Srinagar, July 1 -- Cloudflare, the cloud infrastructure giant powering 20% of the web, has launched a new experimental marketplace called Pay per Crawl, aimed at reshaping how AI companies interact with website content - and giving publishers more control in the process.

Over the past year, Cloudflare has rolled out tools for publishers to combat the surge of AI crawlers, including a one-click AI bot blocker and dashboards that reveal crawler activity. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince previously hinted that these were building blocks for a larger platform where content creators could monetize AI access to their data.

Now, that vision is taking shape.

Launched in private beta on Tuesday, Pay per Crawl allows website owners to decide how A...