I Made My Website Charge AI Crawlers with HTTP 402. In 30 Days, 5,811 Came and 5 Paid.

I run a content site, do-and-coffee.com. Like everyone else, it gets scraped by AI crawlers. Instead of blocking them, I did something else: I put a paywall in front of the site that returns HTTP 402 Payment Required to bots, with machine-readable payment instructions. If a crawler pays a cent in USDC, it gets the article. If it doesn't, it gets the 402 and nothing else.

Then I let it run for 30 days and watched. Here's what actually happened — and it's not the number you'd put on a pitch deck.

TL;DR

A Cloudflare Worker sits in front of the site. AI crawlers get 402 + x402 payment requirements; humans and search bots pass through free.

Payment is USDC on Base, $0.01 per article, verified and settled through Coinbase's CDP facilitator.