Can Cloudflare save the web from AI?

Cloudflare is engineering a pay-per-crawl internet economy as AI bot traffic overtakes human traffic, threatening to upend advertising, publishing, and media business models.

• Bot traffic explosion: Cloudflare data shows automated traffic surpassed human traffic online in May 2025 (earlier than a prior forecast of 2H2027), and Matthew Prince expects bots to outnumber humans 1,000-to-1 within five years.
• New payment model: Cloudflare is reviving the dormant HTTP 402 'Payment Required' protocol, working with Coinbase and Stripe so AI crawlers pay fractions of a penny per page, replacing advertising as the web's funding model.

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