For decades, the web ran on a simple deal: Publishers and companies made information freely accessible, search engines and other crawlers indexed it, and those services returned human traffic. Sites could then monetize that traffic through ads, subscriptions, or commerce.
But that’s all changing quickly, 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 web page, summarize the content, and keep the source user within a chatbot or automated workflow instead of sending the person back to the original site. Cohen said that change is breaking the old Internet business model, as non-human traffic now exceeds human participation.
Cloudflare’s proposed answer is to give websites more control over automated traffic: identify bots, verify who they are, understand what they intend to do, and decide whether to allow them, block them, or charge them. Cohen pointed to x402, an open payments protocol built around the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, as one part of that stack.
“We have a billion 402 responses every day on the Cloudflare network,” Cohen said. The status code has become part of the technical foundation of x402, an open agent payments framework that Cloudflare is developing with Coinbase.
“Think of it as a billion voices saying, I want to keep producing whatever I’m producing, but I need to get paid for it so I can keep doing it,” Cohen said.
CoinDesk reported in March that on-chain activity linked to the protocol remained small and experimental, with x402 processing approximately $28,000 in daily volume at the time. Cohen’s comments suggest that Cloudflare sees a much larger pool of latent demand at the network layer.
She framed the change as a structural change in how the Internet works. “More than half of the traffic on the Internet today is non-human,” he said, “and that non-human traffic is growing much faster than human traffic.” A decade ago, he said, trackers visited a site twice and returned a human visitor. Today, the ratio is “tens of thousands to one for AI companies taking down your site,” undermining the advertising and subscription model that has long funded online content.
He positioned Cloudflare as a network layer infrastructure for that reconstruction, not as a payment gateway itself. The company processes more than 100 million requests per second at its peak, Cohen said, citing Swift’s roughly 68 million messages per day as a comparison.
Cohen also pointed to Cloudflare’s Web Bot Auth crypto verification stack and recent work involving Visa and Experian as part of the next layer of agent commerce. The goal, he said, is to help merchants accept purchases initiated by AI agents while also verifying that there is a real human being 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 will be valued.”
