For decades, the internet has operated on a simple model: publishers and businesses provide information for free, search engines and other web crawlers scrape and index that information, and these services direct user traffic to websites. Websites then monetize this traffic through advertising, subscriptions, or e-commerce.
But all of this is changing rapidly, said Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Miami.
With the rise of AI agents, software can scrape web content, summarize it, and keep original users within chatbots or automated workflows rather than redirecting them back to the original website. Cohen says this shift is disrupting the internet’s original business model, as non-human traffic now exceeds human user engagement.
Cloudflare's proposed solution empowers websites with greater control over automated traffic: identifying bots, verifying their identity, understanding their intent, and deciding whether to allow, block, or charge them. Cohen notes that x402, an open payment protocol built on the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, is part of this solution.
Cohen said, "The Cloudflare network receives one billion 402 responses per day." This status code has become one of the technical foundations of x402, an open proxy payment framework developed by Cloudflare. Development using Coinbase.
Cohen said: "You can think of it as a billion voices saying, I want to keep creating the work I'm creating, but I need to be paid to continue."
CoinDesk reported that in March, on-chain activity associated with the protocol remained minimal and in a testing phase, with x402’s daily trading volume at around $28,000. Cohen’s comments suggest that Cloudflare sees greater potential demand at the network layer.
She described this shift as a structural change in how the internet operates. “Today, more than half of the traffic on the internet is not from humans,” she said, “and this non-human traffic is growing at a much faster rate than human traffic.” She noted that a decade ago, web crawlers would visit a website twice before a human visitor arrived. Now, AI companies are scraping website data at a ratio of “tens of thousands to one,” undermining the advertising and subscription models that have long supported online content.
She positioned Cloudflare as network-layer infrastructure in the rebuilding process, not as the payment channel itself. Cohen noted that the company handles over 100 million requests per second at peak times, contrasting this with Swift’s approximately 68 million messages per day.
Kohn also mentioned Cloudflare’s Web Bot Auth cryptographic verification stack, as well as recent initiatives by Visa and Experian, all of which are part of the next generation of intelligent commerce. She said the goal is to help merchants accept purchases initiated by AI agents while verifying that each transaction is backed by a real person.
Cohen said: "We believe that if we get it right, a golden age of content will emerge, and high-quality original content will be valued."