More than half of internet traffic is no longer human for the first time, according to Cloudflare.
The US internet infrastructure company, which sits in front of more than 20% of the web, says daily requests from AI agents on its network have grown by more than 1,700% in a year.
Its network now handles about 115 million requests a second, almost double the level at the end of 2024.
Agents are software acting on someone's behalf, such as a chatbot fetching pages to answer a user's question.
The broken bargain
For 30 years, the web ran on a simple deal.
Sites let search engines crawl their pages, the search engines sent them visitors, and those visitors saw ads or bought subscriptions.
AI answer engines break that deal by reading the page and summarising it, so the reader never visits.
Some of the most heavily crawled sectors, including retail, software and financial services, have seen human traffic fall by as much as 40% in less than a year.
Every bot visit still costs the site bandwidth and computing power, but brings in no revenue.
The share of crawler traffic collecting data to train AI models has also jumped, from 22% in spring 2025 to 52% by June this year.
Charging the machines
Cloudflare's answer is to make the bots pay.
A new service, Pay Per Use, pays publishers whenever an AI company actually uses their content, rather than for each visit.
Buyers are verified and report how the content was used, so publishers can see what earned them money.
A second tool, Monetization Gateway, lets sites charge agents for each request, lookup or query.
A sports statistics site, for example, could charge a fraction of a cent each time an agent asks who leads the league in assists.
Both are being launched as tests.
Picking and choosing
Cloudflare has also split its single "block AI bots" switch into separate controls for search, agents and training.
Fewer than 1% of its sites block search crawlers, but 17% block training crawlers.
A new setting lets sites stay in search results while telling the crawler not to use their content for training.
Apple, Google and Microsoft have agreed to honour it.
The pitch lands the same week it emerged that Google is paying about 100 publishers for content used in its AI answers.
Cloudflare is betting most of the web will never get a deal like that.
