[blancotech]

> An important mechanism here is that even if a crawler doesn’t have a billing relationship with Cloudflare, and thus couldn’t be charged for access, a publisher can still choose to ‘charge’ them. This is the functional equivalent of a network level block (an HTTP 403 Forbidden response where no content is returned) — but with the added benefit of telling the crawler there could be a relationship in the future.

IMO this is why this will not work. If you're too small a publisher, you don't want to lose potential click-through traffic. If you're a big publisher, you negotiate with the main bots that crawl a site (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Anthropic, Google, Grok).

The only way I can see something like this work is if a large "bot" providers set the standard and say they'll pay if this is set up (unlikely) or smaller apps that crawl see that this as cheaper than a proxy. But in the end, most of the traffic comes from a few large players.