Making $$$ selling to AI Agents

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
Cloudflare launched something huge around AI agents, and I think a lot of people haven't really paid attention. But I think the people that pay attention are going to be able to create businesses that monetize in a completely new way that I think is really interesting. So I wanted to do an episode breaking down everything. By the end of this episode, I want you to understand three things. The first is, what is Cloudflare actually doing here in plain English around AI agents? The second is, why does this create a new business model for the internet? And the third is, startup ideas I think you should actually build on top of this. I want to show you the wedge, I want to show you who the customer is, what the first version looks like, how I would sell it and how I would become a real company. The opportunity is way bigger than Cloudflare launched a thing here. The opportunity is agents are going to need clean, trusted, useful resources to do their jobs and the people that figure this out and launch things in the next 18 months are going to do incredible things. I'm going to show you exactly how everything works in complain English. I have no affiliation with Cloudflare. I just want to see you win. I'm rooting for you and I'll see you in there. Enjoy the episode. Let's start with the old bargain. That's the way I think about the old bargain of the internet.
For a long time, if you owned a website, you let search engine crawl it because search engines sent you traffic. And then Google would read your site, Google would index your site, someone would search, your page would hopefully show up, and then a human being would click through. Once the human being landed on your website, you would monetize that attention. Maybe you'd show ads, maybe you'd capture their email, maybe you'd sell them a subscription or do some affiliate thing. That was the trade. So the crawler got the content, the website got the visitor, the visitor got the answer, and the model funded a massive part of the internet. Now, AI agents are changing this flow because an AI agent or AI system can read your page, pull the useful answer, give that answer to the user, and the user might not visit your website. So the content still created value, but the website may lose the visit. And if the website loses the visit, it loses the ad impression, the email capture, right? The affiliate click, all that stuff, it just loses it. So that's why a lot of publishers are upset. But I actually think the publisher conversation is only the first inning. The bigger idea is that agents are going to use the internet in a way software uses infrastructure. So they'll request things, they'll call tools, they'll compare products, they'll retrieve data. By the way, I'm gonna get into how Cloudflare plays into all this in a second. They'll buy access, they'll take action. And that basically means that the internet needs a new pricing for machine usage. Obviously, a human being doesn't want to pay 0.0003 cents to read a page, that would feel ridiculous. If I clicked on a recipe and it said, please pay one third of a cent to see the sauce, I would close the laptop and probably order tacos out of spite. But a machine doesn't care if the payment is tiny and automatic. If the data helps the agent complete the job, the agent can pay. And that's really the mental model. The human web monetized attention, and the agent web monetizes useful resources.
So what is Cloudflare actually doing here? Well, there's a few pieces I want to go over. The first is AI crawl control, which gives site owners visibility and control over AI crawlers. You can see a crawler activity. You can allow certain crawlers to do things, and you can block certain crawlers. You can understand who's accessing your content. They also announce pay-per-crawl, and that's the direct monetization piece. That's the piece that's going to get people paid. A site owner now can charge AI crawlers when they access content. The crawler could either present payment intent in the request or receive a 402 payment required response with the pricing. Then, monetization gateway is even a bigger version of that. So Cloudflare is basically saying this should not just apply to crawler's reading pages. Any resource behind Cloudflare could have payment rules. A web page, a data set, an API, an MCP tool call, basically a premium endpoint, a file, a search index. And the payment rail they're talking about is X402, which uses the HTTP 402 payment required status code. The agent requests the resource. The server says, this costs this amount, usually a fraction of a penny. And the agent pays and retries with proof of payment. Cloudflare can verify at the edge before the request hits the origin. Basically, in plain English, Cloudflare is trying to make paid access feel like part of the internet itself. So you don't have this giant checkout flow, you don't have to create an account first, there's no sales call, there's no enterprise procurement stuff. Basically, there's a request that becomes the transaction. And that's a really, really big idea.