Research by DNA ·
How to charge AI crawlers without charging your customers
AI is the most expensive visitor your site has, and the most valuable one.
Perplexity’s crawlers take 4,056 pages for every visitor they send back; Google’s take 4.8. Yet the shoppers AI sends convert 90% better than everyone else. Tom is one of them: he asks his ChatGPT agent to find running shoes under $150, and to your site it looks exactly like an agent working for nobody.
ChatGPT agent, nobody signed in
$0.0001, or no page
ChatGPT agent, working for Tom
Free, for Tom
AI crawlers take hundreds of pages for each visitor they send back.
Training made up 52% of crawler requests on Cloudflare in June 2026, up from 22% in spring 2025, and human traffic in the most heavily crawled categories fell as much as 40% in a year. The visitors AI does send are the ones you want most.
AI crawlers take 40 to 4,056 pages for every visitor they send. Google takes 4.8.
| Perplexity | 4,056 |
|---|---|
| OpenAI* | 775 |
| Anthropic | 482 |
| Microsoft Copilot | 40 |
| 4.8 |
The shoppers AI sends went from converting 9% worse than other visitors to 90% better.
| Aug ’25 | −9% |
|---|---|
| Sep ’25 | +5% |
| Oct ’25 | +16% |
| Nov–Dec ’25 | +31% |
| Mar ’26 | +42% |
| May ’26 | +54% |
| Jul ’26 | +60% |
| Sep ’26 | +90% |
Blocking and flat prices both turn Tom away.
Since 2025 a site can answer an AI crawler with a price as well as a block, and both of the obvious ways to use that turn Tom away. Block AI crawlers and Tom’s agent is turned away with them. Put one price on every agent and Tom’s agent pays what a training crawler pays, while a competitor that charges nothing is one fetch away. Pay-per-crawl tools let you charge, allow or block each crawler by name, but a name tells you who built the agent, not whether a person is waiting on it.
| Block | One price | DNA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training crawlers are asked to pay | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tom’s agent gets in free | No | No | Yes |
| Search crawlers you allow keep citing you | Named only | No | Yes |
| What Tom has to do | Turned away | Pays per page | Signs in daily |
DNA charges agents with nobody behind them and lets people’s agents in free.
The rule is called charge or require a human. An agent that asks for a priced page gets the price and a link for its person. Tom taps the link and signs in to DNA once, and his agent reads free across your site for the next 24 hours. An agent with nobody behind it pays for each page in crypto, or doesn’t get it. Put a rule letting search crawlers in above it, and they keep citing you free. DNA checks each agent against its maker’s keys and published addresses, so a scraper using GPTBot’s name is caught and you never keep a list of agents.
ChatGPT agent for Tom
yourstore.com asks DNA to check a person is behind this visit
Free
Let in free
Charging a card for each page costs 3,000 times the price.
A card charge costs 2.9% plus 30¢ at Stripe, so the fee alone on a $0.0001 page is $0.30. Asking Tom to approve each page is worse. Ben Thompson: “micro-transactions are anti-human.”
Some pages you’ll want to charge everyone for, people included. There DNA charges Tom’s card once: he tops up $5, $10 or $25 and his agent spends it a page at a time. He approves each site when the agent asks, or turns on auto-spend. You’re paid your share of card payments after the month closes. Agents with their own wallet pay in crypto: x402 settled about $24 million across 75 million payments in the 30 days to mid-July. Once your site is on DNA you set the price in the dashboard, with no payment code to write, and crypto lands in your wallet in full as each payment settles.
See what your pages would earn before anyone pays.
Every new price starts as a test. DNA logs what each visit would have paid and charges nobody, so you see the number on your own traffic before you switch it on. Rules run before price, so an agent you’ve stopped can’t pay its way in.
From your analytics: visits referred by chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and the like.
964,000 pages a month, $964.00 if every one paid
Pages its crawlers take from you
964,000
a month, at 482 for each visitor sent. At $0.001 a page, that’s $964.00 if every one paid.
Shoppers AI sends you
2,000 a month, free
and their agents read free once a person signs in
Method and sources
- Crawl-to-refer ratios: Cloudflare Radar, October 1–30, 2026, for the sites Cloudflare serves, as compiled by SEOmator. Radar counts a referral only when the visit carries a Referer header naming the platform, so the ratios run high, OpenAI’s most, since ChatGPT’s links stopped sending one in October.
- Training share, agent growth and the human-traffic decline: Cloudflare, September 30, 2026.
- Conversion: Adobe Analytics, lifts over non-AI visits to US retail sites, not conversion rates.
- Payments for software: the x402 Foundation started operating on July 14, 2026 with 40 members, Visa and Stripe among them; Cloudflare reported daily AI agent requests up more than 1,700% in a year.
- x402 volume: CoinDesk, July 15, 2026, reporting the protocol’s own counts, which CoinDesk did not verify.
- Card fees: Stripe’s standard US online rate. $0.0001 is an example price; sites set their own. Tom is an example, and so are the log rows and the calculator’s defaults.
- In the product, DNA identifies an agent by a signature checked against its maker’s published keys, or by an address inside its maker’s published ranges. Analysis and conclusions are our own.