Cloudflare has started making money from the AI agents roaming the web, and its first customer for the privilege is OpenAI. The internet infrastructure company said on its third-quarter earnings call on November 5 that it recorded its first revenue from a set of products it calls Act 4, tools designed to charge or meter the traffic AI agents generate as they visit websites. Chief executive Matthew Prince said OpenAI is already paying for one of them, and he believes the business could one day become Cloudflare's largest.
The disclosure marks a turning point in the long-running fight between publishers and the AI companies that read their pages. For years, websites have watched automated crawlers take far more than they give back, fetching pages without clicking ads or sending readers. Cloudflare, whose network sits in front of more than a fifth of the web, is now building the toll booths.
OpenAI pays to crawl less
The first paid service Prince described is a practical one. Under a research pilot Cloudflare announced on July 8, the company sends OpenAI signals about when a web page has changed, so OpenAI's crawler does not have to keep re-fetching pages that are unchanged. A restaurant that updates its prices, for example, triggers a signal, while a page that has sat untouched for weeks does not get crawled again for no reason.
"OpenAI is paying for that," Prince said on the call, adding that he expects other AI companies to follow. Neither Cloudflare nor OpenAI has disclosed what the arrangement is worth or when payments began, and the revenue from Act 4 products was not broken out in the company's results. Cloudflare reported third-quarter revenue of $782.5 million, up 39 percent year over year, its fastest growth in nearly four years.
The new version of SEO
Prince also described a second, broader ambition: helping websites get found — and paid — by AI agents. For customers that want more traffic from agents, Cloudflare is working on what he called "sort of the new version of SEO," tools that help businesses show up in AI-generated answers rather than in search results.
The idea is that an agent should say why it is visiting. The more an agent tells a site about its purpose, the more a site may be willing to "charge it less to access the page," Prince said. Two payment products, the Monetization Gateway and Pay Per Use, moved into beta on September 30, and a Pay Per Crawl option that charges bots a small fee per page remains in private beta, built around the web's long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code.
A bet on the agentic internet
Cloudflare frames Act 4 as the combination of its security and networking business with its developer platform, applied to what it calls the agentic internet — a web where autonomous agents, not people, generate most of the traffic. Agents already made more than 600 billion requests on Cloudflare's network last quarter, the company said at its Connect event in October, and its active developer base has doubled to 10 million this year.
Prince said he could not predict when the new models would become major revenue sources, but suggested they could become Cloudflare's largest business over a 10-year horizon. Meta, whose Muse agent runs on Cloudflare, and Google are both customers, Prince said, with Cloudflare acting as the intermediary between Meta's proxy and the content providers it reaches. Whether publishers embrace paying agents or keep blocking them, the company that guards the gates now has a way to charge for the key.
