Cloudflare Booked Its First Revenue From Metering AI Agents' Web Traffic

Cloudflare’s products for managing AI agent traffic, which it calls Act 4, have started earning money, CEO Matthew Prince told investors, and OpenAI is one of the payers. Cloudflare did not say how much.

OpenAI is the only payer Cloudflare has named, and it pays for help crawling, not for an agent’s visit to a site. For a business that runs public web pages, what an agent owes at the door is still unsettled, and Cloudflare has not shown what that bill looks like.

What is OpenAI paying for?

Cloudflare sends OpenAI signals that flag which pages have changed, so OpenAI’s crawlers revisit only those and skip the rest. Prince described the alternative as crawling everything, over and over. Prince said the arrangement saves OpenAI money and gets Cloudflare’s customers’ newest content to it faster.

“OpenAI is paying for that,” he said, adding that Cloudflare is already recognizing significant revenue from it and that other companies in the space will likely do the same. Cloudflare disclosed no price or contract terms.

Where does the charging go next?

Prince expects micropayments: small fees paid each time an agent visits a site. A site could cut the fee for an agent that explains why it is there, or admit it free. An agent shopping for a family of four’s Hawaii vacation, for example, would give a travel site context it could use for advertising.

He gave no timetable. “I don’t know exactly how long it will be before it turns into major sources of revenue,” he said, but he expects Act 4 to become the largest part of Cloudflare’s business in about 10 years.

Cloudflare also sits on both sides of the exchange. Meta, which makes the Muse agent, is a Cloudflare customer, Prince said, and so are many of the sites those agents visit.

What did the quarter show?

Revenue for the third quarter reached $782.5 million, up 39% from a year earlier, and Cloudflare expects $845 million to $846 million in the fourth quarter, its release shows. Its GAAP net loss widened to $34.1 million from $1.3 million, yet Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert said the company expects GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter.

Neither the release nor the call put a figure on the Act 4 revenue inside those totals. The test for any company with public web pages is whether it knows which AI agents visit them, and whether any of those agents pays.