Cloudflare Launches 2 AI Monetization Betas as Agent Traffic Jumps 1,700%

3 articles · Updated · The Cloudflare Blog · Sep 30

Cloudflare rolled out two beta products—Pay Per Use and Monetization Gateway—to let websites charge AI agents for content, API calls and other requests instead of simply blocking them.
More than half of internet traffic is now non-human on Cloudflare’s network, and daily AI-agent requests have surged over 1,700% in a year, while some heavily crawled sectors saw human traffic drop by as much as 40%.
The company also shipped Disallow AI Training on Sept. 15 and earlier split controls into Search, Agent and Training categories; Apple, Google and Microsoft have committed to honor the training opt-out.
Cloudflare says the tools rely on verified bot identity and payment rails such as Web Bot Auth and x402, with more than 500 billion verified bot requests a week already visible on its network.
With more than 20% of the web and nearly 80% of leading AI companies on its network, Cloudflare is positioning itself as infrastructure for an 'agentic' web where software visitors pay their share.