{
  "dataset": "glossary",
  "record": {
    "id": "pay-per-crawl",
    "term": "Pay-per-crawl",
    "category": "commerce",
    "short_def": "A Cloudflare marketplace mechanism that lets a site charge AI crawlers per request — returning HTTP 402 to unpaid bots with a price in response headers.",
    "long_def": "Announced by Cloudflare on 1 July 2025 (private beta). A site sets a price; when an AI crawler requests a page without payment the edge answers HTTP 402 Payment Required with crawler-price headers, and Cloudflare acts as merchant of record to settle. It turns crawling from a free externality into a metered transaction.",
    "see_also": [],
    "etymology_origin": "Announced by Cloudflare, 1 July 2025 (private beta).",
    "related_to": [],
    "contrast_with": "Where RSL is a licensing standard (the terms), pay-per-crawl is an enforcement + settlement mechanism (the toll booth).",
    "example": "A news site enables pay-per-crawl so GPTBot must pay per fetch instead of crawling for free.",
    "source": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/",
    "status": "beta",
    "why_it_matters": "One of the three access-economics levers (block / price / permit) and a live way publishers monetize AI crawling.",
    "sameAs": [],
    "bridge_entity": "/access-economics",
    "last_verified": "2026-06-15",
    "md_twin": "/glossary/pay-per-crawl.md"
  }
}