OpenAI Pays Cloudflare for Page-Change Hints as 'New SEO' Emerges

By James Calloway

OpenAI is paying Cloudflare for hints that tell its crawler when web pages change — one of the first confirmed revenue streams in what CEO Matthew Prince calls "sort of the new version of SEO."

Prince disclosed the payments on Cloudflare's third-quarter earnings call. He gave no figure for the revenue, and the Q3 results release, which reported $782.5 million in revenue, up 39% year over year, doesn't break it out either. But he confirmed Cloudflare has recorded its first revenue from what it calls Act 4 products — the portfolio meant to build a new business model for the internet.

A Goldman Sachs analyst asked when Act 4 will generate meaningful revenue. Prince replied that Cloudflare is already "recognizing significant amounts of revenue" from making AI agents' visits to websites more efficient.

How the OpenAI deal works

Under the partnership, Cloudflare tells OpenAI when a page has been updated — say, a restaurant changes its prices — so OpenAI's crawler stops re-fetching the same page. "OpenAI is paying for that," Prince said, adding that he expects other AI companies to strike similar deals.

The pilot went public on July 8, using signals like content freshness and page changes from participating websites. Cloudflare's Oct. 15 results posting said it's still working with OpenAI to determine how better discovery leads to business outcomes. Prince didn't say what OpenAI pays or when payments started. Whether the websites in the pilot get a share of that money wasn't addressed on the call.

Optimize for agents or block them

Asked by a Wells Fargo analyst whether customers want more AI agent traffic, Prince said it depends on the customer — some want as many agents as possible.

"Others see them as a bane to their business and want to keep them away," he said.

Cloudflare helps agent-friendly customers attract and handle that traffic efficiently. Customers who see agents as a threat get them blocked, at no charge for that traffic.

The math explains the split. An agent picking where its user eats dinner might pull menus from 1,000 restaurant websites; the user visits one. The other 999 restaurants carry the cost with no benefit. A human, by contrast, looks at two or three pages. On the August call, Prince said nonhuman traffic could reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years if trends held. This quarter, he said he expects it sooner.

"It can't be a free ride for all the agents that are out there," Prince said.

Discounts for agents that explain themselves

Beyond efficiency deals, Prince expects micropayments when agents visit sites. The more an agent explains why it's there, the more a site may "charge it less to access the page." An agent telling a travel site it's planning a Hawaii vacation for a family of four might get in free, because the request opens advertising opportunities.

He isn't sure when that becomes a major revenue source. But looking 10 years out, he said: "I would imagine that this becomes the largest part of Cloudflare's business."

Cloudflare moved two payment products into beta on Sept. 30:

• Monetization Gateway — lets sellers charge AI agents per request.
• Pay Per Use — pays publishers who accept an AI company's offer for reported uses.

What's live today

Prince framed welcome-or-block as a dashboard choice available now. Cloudflare offers AI Crawl Control on every plan, letting users permit or deny individual AI crawlers; documentation lists Pay Per Crawl as in private beta. Notably, he didn't name a single Cloudflare service for optimizing sites for agent traffic.

He promised more Act 4 detail "in the quarters to come." The open question: whether other AI companies pay for crawl hints as he predicted — and how much of that money reaches the sites supplying the pages.