Pay-per-crawl

Charging AI crawlers and agents per request for access to content, rather than serving them free (or blocking them outright) — operationalized by CDN-level schemes and protocols like x402 that quote a price in the HTTP response itself. The first commercial answer to “agents consume the web but don’t see ads.” Its economics are unproven; its architecture — machine-readable prices on machine-consumed resources — is probably permanent.