A paywall for AI is not viable yet

Suganthan Mohanadasan built a website that charges AI agents a penny per page using the x402 protocol. The only AIs that paid were the ones he had previously configured on his site to pay; by default, AIs stopped as soon as they saw the 402 on the site, without making any payment

Suganthan Mohanadasan published an experiment to test whether an AI was capable of paying for a crawl when faced with a paywall. To do so, he relied on the x402 protocol, created by Coinbase and now under a Linux Foundation foundation (it is different from Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl, which is still in closed beta, and it is still unclear how well it actually works).

A website on a Cloudflare Worker that responds to every request with an HTTP 402 status code, "payment required", and an offer of one cent on a test network, with no real value. The agent that wants the content has to sign a transfer authorization, an intermediary settles it and the server returns the page along with the receipt.

The reality of the experiment is that the only AIs that paid were the ones he had previously configured on his site to pay; by default, AIs stopped as soon as they saw the 402 on the site, without making any payment.

Something I find completely understandable, because if AIs paid to review content in order to complete their task, it could lead to quite a few security problems, whether through Prompt Injection (which still happens) or simply because the cost of a simple query could climb to something unexpected, with the AI deciding to pay to access content without the human putting up the money being fully aware of it.

The experiment carried out by Suganthan Mohanadasan consisted of testing whether it is feasible to automatically charge artificial intelligence agents and crawlers every time they try to read the content of a web page. Clearly, the time has not come yet, and personally I think it makes sense for these payments to be made only if the human behind them wants to see what is behind that content.

I am fully aware of how much AI bots overload websites, but from my point of view this is a new reality, and putting up paywalls is not the path that will help us improve GEO, nor do I think it will help us monetize, even with top-quality content.

References

1. developers.cloudflare.com (n.d.). Cloudflare Wallets (documentation). https://developers.cloudflare.com/wallets/ (cited by the author; I have not opened it)
2. Mohanadasan, S. (2026, September 17). I Made My Website Charge AI Agents A Penny Per Page, Then I Watched Claude Pay It. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/i-made-my-website-charge-ai-agents-a-penny-per-page-then-i-watched-claude-pay-it/589447/ Main source
3. Mohanadasan, S. (n.d.). Original post of the experiment on the author's blog. suganthan.com. https://suganthan.com/blog/x402-pay-per-crawl/ (primary source of the experiment)