Cloudflare and AWS launch AI bot toll‑booth charging model

In July 2025 Cloudflare announced that it will begin charging artificial‑intelligence bots for accessing websites, using a mechanism based on the long‑dormant HTTP 402 status code. The system lets site owners set conditions that determine which AI agents may crawl their pages and what fee they must pay. On June 15 2026 Amazon Web Services added the same capability to its firewall service, offering a comparable “toll‑booth” for AI traffic. Both companies describe the model as a way for publishers to regain control over AI‑driven content extraction and to negotiate consent rather than relying on ad‑based revenue.

The new charges apply to the majority of AI crawlers that train large‑scale models, while sites can still allow benign indexing. The initiative marks the first large‑scale commercial use of the HTTP 402 code since its inception in 1997, signaling a shift toward monetising AI‑generated web traffic.