For decades, the Web operated on a simple bargain: publishers and companies made information freely available, search engines and other crawlers indexed it, and these services returned human traffic. Sites could then monetize this traffic through advertisements, subscriptions or commerce.
But everything is changing quickly, Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare’s chief strategy officer, 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 in a chatbot or automated workflow instead of sending a person back to the original site. Cohen said this change breaks the old business model of the Internet, with non-human traffic now outpacing human engagement.
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, block, or charge them. Cohen highlighted x402, an open payment protocol built around the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, as one part of that stack.
“We receive a billion 402 responses every day on the Cloudflare network,” Cohen said. Status Code is now part of the technical foundation of x402, an open agent payment 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 have to get paid for it in order to keep doing it,” Cohen said.
CoinDesk reported in March that on-chain activity related to the protocol remained low and experimental, with x402 handling daily volume of around $28,000 at the time. Cohen’s comments suggest that Cloudflare detects a much larger pool of latent demand at the network layer.
She described this change as a structural change in how the Internet works. “Today, more than half of the traffic on the entire Internet is non-human,” she said, “and this non-human traffic is growing much faster than human traffic. » Ten years ago, she said, bots would visit a site twice and return 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.
It positioned Cloudflare as a network layer infrastructure for this rebuild, not 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 for comparison.
Cohen also highlighted Cloudflare’s Web Bot Auth crypto verification stack and recent work involving Visa and Experian as part of the next agent commerce layer. The goal, she explained, 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 things right, there will be a golden age of content,” Cohen said, “where high-quality original content will be valued.”
