Cloudflare is drawing a line in the sand—and it wants AI companies to pay up if they want to cross it.
The cloud infrastructure giant, which quietly powers about 20% of everything you see online, just unveiled what could be its most ambitious move yet: an experiment called Pay per Crawl. The idea is simple in theory, but potentially transformative in practice. Under the new model, publishers would be able to charge AI firms every single time their bots crawl a site to ingest content.
It’s a bold bet on the future of the web—one where the flood of AI scraping isn’t just tolerated, but monetized.
Hosts Kirsten Korosec and Max Zeff unpack what this all means. They explore how Pay per Crawl could reshape the economics of content, why Cloudflare spent the past year quietly laying the groundwork with bot-blocking tools, and whether this vision of becoming the central tollbooth for AI access is brilliant—or simply a shot in the dark.
If you have opinions about what AI owes the creators of the internet, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
But that’s not all we dove into. In this week’s episode, you’ll also hear:
- How ICEBlock, the app that lets people anonymously report ICE sightings, went viral overnight—thanks in part to a wave of backlash from former prosecutor Pam Bondi. (Spoiler: ICEBlock is now one of the most downloaded free iPhone apps in the U.S.)
- Why Figma’s S-1 filing is poised to set the tone for one of the year’s biggest IPOs—and what its jaw-dropping 48% revenue growth reveals about the hunger for modern design tools.
- What Grammarly’s acquisition of Superhuman says about the company’s ambition to own the “agentic future” of productivity. (Yes, your email might soon be an AI assistant’s playground.)
- Tesla co-founder JB Straubel’s next big thing, and why his new venture could end up challenging Tesla itself in the energy storage race.
It’s been a week full of surprises, big swings, and some fascinating tension between tech optimism and the reality of who gets paid—and who doesn’t.
Equity will be back next week with more. And for everyone in the U.S., we hope you’re savoring a long holiday weekend.
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