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Cloudflare names Ceramic.ai and You.com as first partners for its Pay Per Use model

Cloudflare announced a Pay Per Use model that pays publishers when their content creates value, such as appearing in an AI assistant's answer, and named Ceramic.ai and You.com as its first partners. No prices or rates were published.

July 1, 2026 Cloudflare announced a Pay Per Use model that pays publishers when their content creates value, such as appearing in an AI assistant's answer, and named Ceramic.ai and You.com as its first partners.1

Terms of the deal

Pay Per Use replaces the Pay Per Crawl idea of charging for each fetch.1 Ceramic.ai and You.com are the first partners, the program is in beta, and a Monetization Gateway is planned.12 The article gives no prices, rates or revenue figures.1

Background

The announcement came on July 1 and 2, 2026, under the slogan "Content Independence Day, one year later."1 The Media Copilot says it is unclear whether the named partners pay publishers directly.2

What it means for data sellers

Publishers on Cloudflare can expect payment tied to use in answers. Because rates are unpublished and the partners are small, sellers should treat it as an early channel. The only source for the launch details is a secondary article.

How the deal came together

  1. Successor to Pay Per Crawl. Pay Per Use pays publishers when content creates value, such as appearing in an AI assistant's answer or being bought by an agent, rather than when a bot downloads a page.
  2. First partners. Ceramic.ai and You.com are named as the first partners.
  3. Payment infrastructure. A Monetization Gateway is planned to manage the payments.
  4. New defaults. From September 15, 2026, Cloudflare blocks Training and Agent crawlers on pages with ads by default for new customers, new sites and all free plans.

Takeaways for companies with data

  • Cloudflare is shifting from charging per fetch to paying per use, which links payment to value created in answers.
  • The first named partners are small AI companies, not the largest labs.
  • The Media Copilot notes the sources do not say these partners pay publishers directly, and Cloudflare is a platform, not a buyer.

Sources

Every numbered reference above points to an entry here. Figures come from these pages as of the date shown at the top of the article. Where a source reports a number it got from unnamed people, the text says so.

  1. Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default: from Pay Per Crawl to Pay Per Use (Pasquale Pillitteri, July 2026)
  2. AI answers run on a library nobody is paying for (The Media Copilot, 2026)

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About the AI Data Deal Tracker

SellYourAIData tracks publicly reported sales and licenses of data to AI companies, with the price, terms and sources for each. Entries are checked against public reporting and updated as deals change. SellYourAIData was not involved in this deal. To ask what your company's data could sell for, get a free valuation. To report a deal, contact us.