Free · estimates, honestly labeled

Pay-per-crawl revenue calculator

In 2026 charging AI crawlers went infrastructure-native: Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl answers bot requests with HTTP 402 and a price (minimum $0.01/crawl), Akamai + TollBit run the same play. This calculator turns your traffic into the two numbers that matter: how many AI-bot requests you serve, and what they'd be worth — if you charged.

Monthly page requests (human + bot) From your CDN or server logs — total HTML requests, not GA sessions (analytics can't see bots). AI-crawler share of requests: Default 4% is an assumption, not your number — read the real share off your server logs or your CDN's bot analytics before believing any estimate. Price per crawl (USD) $0.01 is Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl minimum; publishers can set any flat price.

AI-bot requests / month

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Gross at your price

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Read this before quoting the number

Revenue only comes from bots that agree to pay. The HTTP 402 flow is an offer: crawlers that don't send a crawler-max-price simply get refused. Charging and collecting are different things — most AI crawlers today walk away.
A paywall for bots is a block for AI visibility. Refused crawlers don't index you, which means fewer AI citations. If AI answers send you customers, price that before pricing the crawls — our GA4 segment generator shows what AI referrals are currently worth to you.
Not all bots are equal. Training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot), search indexers (OAI-SearchBot) and live user-fetchers (ChatGPT-User) have different value exchanges — the registry classifies all of them. Blanket decisions are how sites go invisible by accident.
Estimates in, estimates out. This is arithmetic on your inputs, not a forecast. The direction of the market is real though: Cloudflare is already piloting per-answer pricing beyond per-crawl.

Deciding to charge, allow or block starts with knowing who's crawling you today: check any domain's live bot access in the Bot Access Matrix, and put your robots.txt on watch so pricing experiments never silently turn into permanent blocks.