---
title: "Making AI Pay Its Way, With Cloudflare"
url: https://adtech.lol/articles/8334596d-0507-46a9-b235-07751dc72963
source_url: https://www.adexchanger.com/adexchanger-talks/making-ai-pay-its-way-with-cloudflare/
source_site: adexchanger
author: "Lara Cohen"
published: 2026-10-13T01:00:00+00:00
tags: ["AI search", "Cloudflare", "Publisher Monetization"]
publisher: AdTech Radar
---

# Making AI Pay Its Way, With Cloudflare

> A podcast interview with Lara Cohen, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Cloudflare, discusses how AI bots scrape content while publishers seek compensation.

# Making AI Pay Its Way, With Cloudflare

For every human reader they send back to publishers, AI bots scrape thousands of pages, according to Cloudflare.

Yikes.

That’s not what publishers agreed to when they started letting search engines crawl their sites in exchange for traffic, says Lara Cohen, VP of strategic partnerships for media, creators and AI at Cloudflare, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.

Cloudflare, which routes roughly 20% of global internet traffic, is trying to help publishers fight back – and it’s an unlikely hero. As a network security company, Cloudflare is better known for providing CDN services, fending off hackers and helping with domain management.

## Making AI Pay Its Way, With Cloudflare

### AdExchanger Talks

But millions of publishers sit on Cloudflare’s network, and it could see their human traffic drying up.

Cloudflare isn’t anti-AI, Cohen says. Far from it. But “in order for AI to thrive,” she says, “original human content also has to thrive.”

And so Cloudflare has built dashboards that show publishers how often large language models like ChatGPT and Claude pull their content, which URLs are popular and how many of their visitors are human. Publishers can then choose to block the bots – or get paid.

Last month, Cloudflare launched a beta of “pay per use,” a new feature that takes the place of “pay per crawl,” its earlier plan to charge AI companies every time a bot scraped a page.

The thinking now is that LLMs should pay for the value they actually get from a publisher’s content, say by using it to answer a user’s question. AI companies make an offer, and publishers decide whether to take it.

Buyers have to play fair, though. “They have to declare their crawler,” Cohen says. “They have to be showing up honestly.”

But don’t expect AI money to replace ad revenue dollar for dollar.

“I can’t turn back the hands of time and make it 1995,” Cohen says. “What we’re looking for in the marketplace is good actors on both sides who are truly trying to experiment and get this right.”

**Also in this episode**: Dealing with the “Google problem,” Cohen’s theory on how local news has a chance to thrive in the AI era and why she’ll never let an AI agent go shoe shopping for her.

[Making AI Pay Its Way, With Cloudflare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoSucyGdAhA)

Source: [https://www.adexchanger.com/adexchanger-talks/making-ai-pay-its-way-with-cloudflare/](https://www.adexchanger.com/adexchanger-talks/making-ai-pay-its-way-with-cloudflare/)