Key points
- Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the company booked initial revenue from Act 4 offerings in Q3, but gave no dollar figure for it.
- OpenAI pays Cloudflare for signals that show when pages have changed, so its crawler can skip repeat fetches. Amount and start date were not disclosed.
- Prince expects other AI companies to buy similar signals and predicted nonhuman traffic could reach 1,000 times human traffic sooner than five years.
- Cloudflare lets customers block agents without charge or draw more of them; the CEO named no tool for optimizing sites for agents.
Why it matters for marketers: Agent traffic is becoming a paid channel with its own economics, so marketers must decide whether to court agents or block them, and watch whether publishers share in the money.
Cloudflare told investors it began earning money in the third quarter from a new group of products it calls Act 4, which are aimed at building a different business model for the internet. CEO Matthew Prince gave no revenue number, and the quarterly results release, which showed $782.5 million in total revenue, does not split it out.
The one concrete example was OpenAI. Under a partnership, Cloudflare tells OpenAI when a web page has been updated, so the crawler need not repeatedly retrieve unchanged pages. Prince said OpenAI pays for this and that he expects other AI companies to follow. He did not say how much OpenAI pays, when payments began, or whether participating sites receive a share.
For marketers, the call framed agent traffic as a choice. Some customers want as many agents as possible, and Cloudflare helps them attract agents and serve them efficiently. Others want agents kept out, and blocked traffic is not billed. Prince described the new work for the first group as a version of SEO, though he did not name a Cloudflare service built to optimize sites for agents.
Prince also floated micropayments, with agents that explain their purpose possibly getting cheaper or free access, such as one planning a family trip that opens ad opportunities. He is unsure when that becomes a major revenue source. Cloudflare moved two payment products into beta on Sept. 30.
Watch whether other AI companies buy crawl signals as Prince predicted, and whether later disclosures show how much of the money reaches the sites whose content agents use.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.