AI agents are breaking web economics, but Cloudflare says x402 can help

The company’s Chief Strategy Officer said that more than half of internet traffic is now non-human, but that the x402 Foundation is building the rails for a "golden age of content."By Jeffrey Albus|Edited by Nikhilesh De May 5, 2026, 9:47 p.m. 2 min read Make preferred on Stephanie Cohen (Coin Desk)What to know: Cloudflare's network is processing a billion HTTP 402 "payment required" responses every day, according to Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie CohenMore than half of internet traffic is now non-human and growing fast; AI scrapers visit a site at "tens of thousands to one" relative to the human visitors they send back, up from a 2-to-1 ratio a decade ago.Cohen credited Coinbase and Stripe as co-creators of the x402 Foundation and pointed to a recent Cloudflare integration with Visa and Experian as the next layer of the agentic-payments stack.For decades, the web ran on a simple bargain: Publishers and businesses made information freely accessible, search engines and other crawlers indexed it, and those services sent human traffic back. Sites could then monetize that traffic through ads, subscriptions or commerce.

But that's all changing fast, Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen said Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Miami.

With the rise of AI agents, software can scrape a webpage, summarize content and keep the source user inside a chatbot or automated workflow instead of sending a person back to the original site. Cohen said that shift is breaking the internet’s old business model, with non-human traffic now exceeding human engagement.