For decades, the Web ran on a simple trade: Publishers and companies made information freely available, search engines and other crawlers indexed it, and those services sent human traffic back. Sites can 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 advent of AI agents, software can scrape a web page, 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 the shift breaks the Internet’s old business model, where non-human traffic now exceeds human engagement.
Cloudflare’s proposed response 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 pointed to x402, an open payment protocol built around the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, as part 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 payment framework Cloudflare is developing with Coinbase.
“Think of it as a billion voices saying, I’m going to keep producing whatever I’m producing, but I need to be paid for it to keep doing it,” Cohen said.
CoinDesk reported in March that on-chain activity linked to the protocol remained small and experimental, with x402 processing around $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 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 human traffic.” A decade ago, she said, crawlers visited a site twice and sent a human visitor back. Today, the ratio is “ten thousand to one for AI companies 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 tollbooth per se. The company processes more than 100 million queries 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 cryptographic verification stack and recent work involving Visa and Experian as part of the next layer of agent 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 original, high-quality content is valued.”
