# Pay-per-crawl for AI crawlers — HTTP 402 on ADN — ADN

← Back to Learn Pay-per-crawl lets site owners charge AI crawler organisations for successful page fetches on priced paths. Unpaid or unknown AI crawlers receive HTTP 402 Payment Required until they pay or verify. Cooperative, registered agents still pay — they receive a 30% discount off the publisher’s list price.
 ADN is merchant of record and takes 15% of gross crawl revenue as a platform fee.*
 _ADN takes 15% of gross crawl revenue as platform fee; publishers are paid the remainder via Stripe Connect Express after invoice settle._
 For publishers
 • Charge per successful HTTP 200 — default list price $0.002; you set your own price in the dashboard (global plus per-crawler-family Charge, Free, or Block).
 • Off until you enable it in Settings. Works on any host with ADN DNS connect — not limited to Cloudflare zones.
 • Unpaid or unknown AI crawlers receive HTTP 402 until they pay or verify. Discovery paths stay free: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt, security.txt, crawlers.json, and .well-known/*.
 • ADN is merchant of record and takes 15% of gross crawl revenue as a platform fee. Publishers are paid the remainder via Stripe Connect Express after invoice settle; crawlers billed monthly through Stripe Billing meters.
 • Crawl access fees are an access fee for fetching through ADN — not a training licence (Terms of Service §5.1).
 • 402 responses include human-readable pricing in x-adn-crawl-price / x-adn-crawl-price-usd (not the legacy payment-required plain-text header, which is reserved for x402 v2 Base64 JSON when enabled).
 You keep 85% of gross crawl revenue (payout timing follows Stripe Connect Express and normal holds after crawler invoices settle).
 Compared with zone-tied pay-per-crawl products, ADN runs on any host via DNS connect — one DNS record, no requirement that your zone live on a specific CDN.
 For crawler and agent builders
 • Sites may enable pay-per-crawl. Access is not free — you pay the publisher’s list price per successful HTTP 200 on priced paths.
 • Registered, verified ADN agents get 30% off the publisher’s list price (for example $0.002 → $0.0014 at the default list price).
 • Unpaid crawler orgs hit HTTP 402 on priced sites until billing is set up. Monthly invoices via Stripe Billing meters.
 Registration stays free at https://registry.agent-delivery.network/register; the discount applies on sites that enabled pricing.
 How billing works
 • Crawlers: metered usage → Stripe Billing → monthly invoices.
 • Publishers: separate charges and transfers to your connected Express account when crawl fees are collected.
 Legal framing
 Crawl access fees are an access fee for delivery through ADN, aligned with Terms of Service §5.1 . They are not a training licence.
 Frequently asked
 Is pay-per-crawl on by default? No. The feature is off until the site owner enables it in the dashboard and completes payout onboarding.
 What do crawlers pay? Each successful HTTP 200 on a priced path bills at the publisher’s list price (default $0.002). Registered, verified ADN agents pay 30% less — for example $0.0014 when the list price is $0.002.
 What stays free? Standard discovery paths: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt, security.txt, crawlers.json, and everything under .well-known/.
 Is this a licence to train on my content? No. Crawl access fees are charges for fetching content through the ADN gateway on priced paths — not a licence to train models, scrape beyond paid access, or redistribute your content. See the Terms (https://www.agent-delivery.network/terms).
 See how this applies: Mid-market & publishers .
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