Cloudflare CEO says OpenAI pays for crawler change hints

Cloudflare's chief executive Matthew Prince told investors on 5 November that OpenAI pays his company for a specific signal. The signal tells OpenAI's crawler when a webpage has changed. The crawler can then skip pages that have not moved. Prince said the payment is part of Cloudflare's first reported revenue from what he calls "Act 4". Act 4 is a set of products built to charge AI agents for using the web. He did not give the amount OpenAI pays. He did not say when the payments started. Search Engine Journal's Matt G. Southern reported the call.

Prince said AI agent optimization is "sort of the new version of SEO". He said this on Cloudflare's Q3 2026 earnings call. The company reported total Q3 revenue of 782.5 million dollars. That is up 39 percent on the same quarter a year earlier. It now runs at more than 3 billion dollars a year. Act 4 revenue was not reported on its own.

What Cloudflare now sells to AI companies

Two products moved into beta on 30 September. Monetization Gateway lets a publisher charge an AI agent for each request. Pay Per Use pays the publisher when the AI company reports the agent's use. Prince said sites may offer a discount to an agent that explains the visit. He gave the example of an agent saying it is planning a Hawaii trip for a family of four.

The OpenAI change-signal deal is the first one to produce reported revenue on a Cloudflare earnings call. Cloudflare and OpenAI announced their discovery pilot on 8 July. They published more detail on 15 October. Prince said he expects other AI companies to sign similar arrangements. He gave no names and no dates.

The pitch for site owners

Prince said non-human traffic could reach a thousand times human traffic within five years. He said he now expects this to happen sooner. He also said: "It can't be a free ride for all the agents that are out there." His own forecast was blunt. "I would imagine that this becomes the largest part of Cloudflare's business."

The reason, as Prince told it, is scale. A shopping agent may pull menus from 1,000 restaurants to pick one place to dine. In that case 999 restaurants carried the cost of the request. None of them get a customer at the end. The cost is already there for a site owner today. Cloudflare's pitch is that a per-request price turns that cost into a line item. A discount for honest context does the same.

Prince did not state what OpenAI pays for the change signals. He did not break out Act 4 revenue inside the Q3 figures. A buyer picking a side on this now is pricing a market Cloudflare is still defining. Two things would tell a reader whether to budget for it. One is whether other AI companies sign change-signal arrangements like OpenAI's. The other is whether Cloudflare's next earnings call puts a number next to Act 4.

Source

Search Engine Journal by Matt G. Southern, and Cloudflare's Q3 2026 earnings release.