AI agents are breaking web economics, but Cloudflare says x402 can help

For decades, the web ran on a simple bargain: Publishers and businesses made information freely accessible, search engines and other crawlers indexed it, and those services sent human traffic back. Sites could then monetize that traffic through ads, subscriptions or commerce.

But that’s all changing fast, Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen said Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Miami.

With the rise of AI agents, software can scrape a webpage, summarize content and keep the source user inside a chatbot or automated workflow instead of sending a person back to the original site. Cohen said that shift is breaking the internet’s old business model, with non-human traffic now exceeding human engagement.

Cloudflare’s proposed answer is to give websites more control over automated traffic: identify the bots, verify who they are, understand what they intend to do and decide whether to allow, block or charge them. Cohen pointed to x402, an open payments protocol built around the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, as one piece of that stack.

“We have a billion 402 responses every single day on the Cloudflare network,” Cohen said. The status code has become part of the technical foundation for x402, an open agent-payments framework Cloudflare is developing with Coinbase.

“Think about it as a billion voices saying, I want to keep producing whatever I’m producing, but I need to be paid for it in order to keep doing that,” Cohen said.

CoinDesk reported in March that on-chain activity tied to the protocol remained small and experimental, with x402 processing roughly $28,000 in daily volume at the time. Cohen’s comments suggest Cloudflare sees a much larger pool of latent demand at the network layer.

She framed the shift as a structural change in how the internet works. “More than half of the traffic on the overall Internet today is non-human,” she said, “and that non-human traffic is growing much faster than the human traffic.” A decade ago, she said, crawlers visited a site twice and sent back one human visitor. Today, the ratio is “tens of thousands to one for AI companies that are scraping your site,” undermining the ad-and-subscription model that has long funded online content.

She positioned Cloudflare as network-layer infrastructure for that rebuild, not as a payment rail itself. The company processes more than 100 million requests per second at peak, Cohen said, citing Swift’s roughly 68 million messages per day as a comparison.

Cohen also pointed to Cloudflare’s Web Bot Auth cryptographic-verification stack and recent work involving Visa and Experian as part of the next layer of agentic commerce. The goal, she said, is to help merchants accept purchases initiated by AI agents while verifying that a real human is behind each transaction.

“We believe that, if we do this right, there will be a golden age of content,” Cohen said, “where high-quality original content is valued.”