Under Pay Per Crawl, the event is mechanical: Cloudflare's documentation defines it as an HTTP 200 response to a crawler that accepted the price. Under Pay Per Use, the AI company defines the event. Cloudflare's post describes Ceramic's model as pay-per-query and You.com's as on-demand access, and notes that other providers are experimenting with models Cloudflare calls Pay per Query and Pay per Result.

Microsoft's post does not specify the payable unit. It explains that publishers define licensing and usage terms and that AI builders license content for particular grounding scenarios. Pricing appears among the topics co-designed with publishers, but the post does not say who determines it.

What the site owner controls

Google's pilot is by invitation, and participants can opt out at any time from Search Console, per Digiday. Beyond joining, nothing published gives participants a say over terms. One exec told Digiday the numbers offered to their company and several peers were too low to accept, and that talks with Google were ongoing — so some terms are under discussion. Digiday's sources did not say which.

In Pay Per Crawl, the site owner sets the price per domain, can vary it by path with dynamic pricing, and chooses per crawler whether to charge, allow, or block. In Pay Per Use, the owner joins a partner's program, with payment triggered differently depending on the partner; Cloudflare's post does not establish who sets the rate.

Microsoft says joining is voluntary and publishers keep ownership of their content and their editorial independence. The post does not specify what the licensing and usage terms might involve.

What comes back as data

Google's participants can view an AI contribution panel in Search Console showing a monthly earnings figure and some history. Digiday notes that no additional detail on how payouts are calculated is provided. Google also runs weekly calls with some partners. One participant told Digiday they would like a feedback system like Search Console, but for AI inference. David Buttle of the publisher coalition Spur said the first step is setting the precedent that publishers deserve to know when their content informed a response.

Cloudflare records a charge event on each successful paid HTTP 200 retrieval, and its dashboard shows which crawlers accessed content and how often charges occurred. The same page notes the earned balance is not displayed on the dashboard and must be requested from the Cloudflare team. For Pay Per Use, the July post explains that sites in the Ceramic program receive reports on the top queries that surfaced their content, including the specific page, snippet, and average position in search results.

Microsoft promises usage-based reporting so publishers can see how content was valued and where it could provide more value. The post does not say what the reports contain, and no participant has publicly described them.

Google's broader AI reporting exists separately from the pilot. The generative AI performance report rolled out worldwide on Aug. 31, and one Digiday source said the impressions it showed closely tracked traffic lost from traditional search and Discover. Neither the help documentation nor Digiday's reporting connects that report to pilot payments.

The Googlebot question

Cloudflare's per-fetch unit can be pointed at any crawler in its directory, including search engine crawlers. Its documentation warns that setting those crawlers to Block or Charge may hurt SEO performance, because search engines may not be able to index the content. Google's crawler documentation says it does not use content from URLs returning 4xx status codes, and that indexed URLs returning any 4xx other than 429 are removed from the index over time. A 402 Payment Required response is a 4xx.

A site can meter Googlebot, and doing so creates Search visibility risk. Cloudflare's change this week does not alter that. Its Disallow AI Training setting publishes a no-training preference in robots.txt that Google and Apple honor while their crawlers keep crawling for search; its Block option stops Googlebot, Applebot, and Bingbot entirely. For Bing, the setting does not currently indicate a domain-wide no-training preference on its own, and Cloudflare says Microsoft is building robots.txt support targeted for early 2027. Cloudflare reports that less than 1% of its sites block search bots, while 17% use some form of training block.

The same post notes Google expects to launch URL-level transparency tools related to Google-Extended within weeks. Cloudflare mentions these tools briefly; they are distinct from the pilot's contribution reporting.

What it means for publishers

For a site holding a Google pilot invitation, the published record settles the event, the report, and the exit: Google judges the contribution, the report is a monthly figure, and participants opt out through Search Console. It does not define what "significantly" means or clarify whether the Search generative AI control affects eligibility.

For a site behind Cloudflare, two units exist, and this week's update changed crawler controls and migration of existing settings. Block now stops Googlebot for search as well as training, so a site that wants training refused but search kept must set the Training control to Disallow AI Training, not Block. Pay Per Crawl prices the fetch on the owner's terms, with the search-crawler caution in the docs and the balance limitation on earnings. Pay Per Use triggers vary by partner, and the reporting Cloudflare describes is Ceramic's.

For a site weighing Microsoft's marketplace, the primary source establishes publisher-defined terms and usage reporting and names the co-design publishers. It does not say who sets the price or what the reports show. The intake form is the only public route in.

Looking ahead

Cloudflare plans to make its search-signals program broadly available later this year and, according to a Sept. 15 post, aims to give sites control over how much of their content appears in AI summaries by early next year. Google, meanwhile, gave Digiday no expansion date for the pilot and describes it as still early stage.

The reporting gap remains the throughline: Ceramic provides query, page, snippet, and position data through Cloudflare; Microsoft promises usage-based reporting; Google displays a monthly total. More detail would move the market closer to the Search Console-style feedback that one site owner told Digiday they wanted for AI inference.