AI Weekly Malaysia

Cloudflare has moved Pay Per Use into beta, a scheme where an AI company names a price for a specific downstream use of a publisher's content, the publisher accepts or declines, and the buyer self-reports each use through a single API so Cloudflare can bill the buyer and pay the publisher. It follows Pay Per Crawl (launched 2025), which charged for access rather than for what happens after indexing; the pitch is that AI products fetch far more than they use, so per-use pricing should pull in more buyers than per-crawl. Publishers join per-program in the Cloudflare dashboard and see usage counts and earnings; no pricing, buyer names, or adoption numbers are given in the post.

Why: If you run a content or docs site behind Cloudflare, you now have two opt-in models to weigh: Pay Per Crawl charges at access, Pay Per Use charges at downstream use and pays you from buyer-reported usage — so the revenue depends on a buyer's own usage logs, not a measured crawl. If you build an AI product that pulls news, research, or trade content, the single verified-buyer API replaces per-publisher contracts, but only for sites that accept your offer; teams in Malaysia and SEA running either side of that trade should decide before their next crawler policy change whether to enroll or to keep blocking.