Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says the next evolution of the web — an “agentic” internet where AI bots crawl and consume content on behalf of users — will force a rethink of how online content is paid for. In a Bankless interview on May 25, Prince warned that today’s ad-and-subscription model breaks down when non-human agents do the browsing: bots don’t click ads, and one subscription bought by a human won’t fairly compensate the creators whose work agents repeatedly fetch. Prince framed the problem as economic, not purely technical. Cloudflare expects AI bot traffic to surpass human internet traffic in the first half of 2027, a shift that will dramatically increase request volumes to websites. Technically, he argued, the internet can likely absorb the load. The harder question is who will pay for the servers, security and publishing infrastructure that supports that traffic. “If the business model of the internet for the last, you know, 30 years has been ads and subscriptions, the problem is agents don’t click on ads,” Prince said. “And buying one subscription and then having agents be able to basically pick all of the content back up from that, that’s not going to help make sure that the people who are creating that content get compensated.” That argument underpins Cloudflare’s push toward what Prince calls “pay for crawl” — using HTTP 402 (“Payment Required”), an x402-style response approach and stablecoin micropayments to let AI systems pay publishers and infrastructure providers in fractions of a cent. The missing piece so far, he says, is a payment rail cheap and fast enough to handle enormous volumes of tiny transactions: traditional card rails and Visa-style systems are impractical because per-transaction fees make micro-payments uneconomic. Cloudflare’s scale highlights the magnitude of the challenge. The company handles roughly 500 million requests per second across its network. Prince estimates 1%–10% of those requests could be monetizable under a pay-for-crawl model — translating to about 5 million to 50 million paid requests per second if broadly adopted. That’s why even systems touting 2 million transactions per second fall short in Cloudflare’s view. “People will say to us, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re so excited. We can handle 2 million transactions per second.’ I’m like, ‘It’s awesome. Good job. But I think day one I need 10 million transactions per second,’” Prince said. He added the quip: “So if you want to go build like a layer 1 blockchain that can support 100 million transactions per second, call us.” For crypto, Prince’s remarks are both a validation and a challenge. He cast stablecoins not as a niche payment option but as potential core infrastructure for an agent-driven web where bots silently pay for access in the background. At the same time, he conceded he hasn’t yet seen a blockchain ecosystem capable of the throughput Cloudflare would require if it flipped the switch at scale. Prince described a practical end state that avoids AI paywalls for humans: people could continue to access content for free while automated agents would embed microtransactions to compensate publishers and infrastructure providers. Bankless summed it up as “humans get content for free and the robots pay a ton,” a characterization Prince said is close to the objective. Cloudflare positions itself as a coordinator in that system. The company sits in front of a large portion of the web, counts many AI firms among its customers, and already provides site operators tools to manage crawler access. The goal, Prince said, is to give publishers the choice to allow AI systems to consume content freely, block them, or require payment. At press time, the total crypto market capitalization stood at $2.55 trillion — a reminder that while stablecoins and blockchain scaling are suddenly front-and-center in infrastructure conversations, significant technical and economic work remains before micropayments can underpin an internet built for AI agents. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news