For many years, the net ran on a easy cut price: Publishers and companies made info freely accessible, search engines like google and yahoo and different crawlers listed it, and people companies despatched human site visitors again. Websites may then monetize that site visitors by advertisements, subscriptions or commerce.
However that is all altering quick, Cloudflare Chief Technique Officer Stephanie Cohen mentioned Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Miami.
With the rise of AI brokers, software program can scrape a webpage, summarize content material and preserve the supply person inside a chatbot or automated workflow as an alternative of sending an individual again to the unique website. Cohen mentioned that shift is breaking the web’s previous enterprise mannequin, with non-human site visitors now exceeding human engagement.
Cloudflare’s proposed reply is to present web sites extra management over automated site visitors: establish the bots, confirm who they’re, perceive what they intend to do and determine whether or not to permit, block or cost them. Cohen pointed to x402, an open funds protocol constructed across the HTTP 402 “Fee Required” standing code, as one piece of that stack.
“We’ve got a billion 402 responses each single day on the Cloudflare community,” Cohen mentioned. The standing code has turn into a part of the technical basis for x402, an open agent-payments framework Cloudflare is developing with Coinbase.
“Give it some thought as a billion voices saying, I need to preserve producing no matter I am producing, however I must be paid for it so as to preserve doing that,” Cohen mentioned.
CoinDesk reported in March that on-chain exercise tied to the protocol remained small and experimental, with x402 processing roughly $28,000 in each day quantity on the time. Cohen’s feedback counsel Cloudflare sees a a lot bigger pool of latent demand on the community layer.
She framed the shift as a structural change in how the web works. “Greater than half of the site visitors on the general Web at present is non-human,” she mentioned, “and that non-human site visitors is rising a lot quicker than the human site visitors.” A decade in the past, she mentioned, crawlers visited a website twice and despatched again one human customer. As we speak, the ratio is “tens of hundreds to 1 for AI firms which are scraping your website,” undermining the ad-and-subscription mannequin that has lengthy funded on-line content material.
She positioned Cloudflare as network-layer infrastructure for that rebuild, not as a fee rail itself. The corporate processes greater than 100 million requests per second at peak, Cohen mentioned, citing Swift’s roughly 68 million messages per day as a comparability.
Cohen additionally pointed to Cloudflare’s Internet Bot Auth cryptographic-verification stack and up to date work involving Visa and Experian as a part of the following layer of agentic commerce. The objective, she mentioned, is to assist retailers settle for purchases initiated by AI brokers whereas verifying that an actual human is behind every transaction.
“We consider that, if we do that proper, there will probably be a golden age of content material,” Cohen mentioned, “the place high-quality unique content material is valued.”
