Cloudflare launches pay-per-crawl on HTTP 402

Site owners can charge AI crawlers per request, with Cloudflare as merchant of record in the beta.

On 1 July 2025 Cloudflare published pay-per-crawl in private beta. A crawler either presents payment intent and receives 200, or receives HTTP 402 with pricing. Cloudflare framed the experiment as infrastructure for an agentic web in which research agents can spend a budget to acquire content.

Why it matters

A major edge network putting 402 in production path for crawlers is distribution for machine payments, even where settlement is not x402 USDC.

Source: Cloudflare Blog

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