x402

A protocol riff on HTTP 402 so agents can pay for resources. Experimental economics for crawling and APIs.

Most brands still want free crawls from labs they care about.

If you meter, allowlist the bots that create demand.

Examples

A research API charges agents per call. A content site that charges GPTBot and then asks why they vanished mixed up the customer.

AP2 is Google’s proposed way for agents to pay with signed mandates — what the agent is allowed to buy, and on whose behalf.

Bots from model labs and answer engines that fetch pages for training, retrieval, or user-initiated reading.

Charging AI bots per request (HTTP 402 ideas). A publisher experiment. Most brands still want to be crawled for free.

Should we implement 402? +

Probably not on the marketing site. Maybe on a data API.

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