How can I get paid when AI uses my content?

Short answer: Unless you are a large publisher with a licensing deal, the practical way is to charge per request: your site asks AI agents and crawlers for a small payment before serving a page, using the open x402 standard. They pay in stablecoins, straight to your wallet, and people keep reading for free.

Try Penni free in test mode · Check any URL with the free x402 checker

AI assistants answer questions with what they read on the web: articles, reviews, recipes, documentation, data. The people who made it rarely see a visit, let alone money. If you publish online, there are a few routes to getting paid.

Licensing deals

Large news publishers and platforms have signed deals with AI companies for access to their archives. These are negotiated one by one, and only make sense at a scale most sites never reach. If you are a blog, a niche publication or a small media company, nobody is going to call.

AI licensing platforms

A number of companies now sit between publishers and AI firms, collecting usage and paying out a share. They can work, but you join their programme, accept their terms and wait for their payouts, and the AI companies have to join too.

Charge per request

The more direct route needs no deal at all: your site sets a price, and any AI agent or crawler that wants a page pays it, in the request itself. This is what x402 does. The site answers 402 Payment Required with a price; the agent's wallet signs a payment and asks again; the site checks the payment and serves the page. It takes about two seconds; how it works shows each step.

• No contract, no sign-up for the payer, no invoices.
• Prices as low as a fraction of a cent, which card payments can't do (see why).
• Payments in euro or dollar stablecoins (EURC or USDC), straight to your own wallet.
• People and search engines read for free; only machines pay.

Be realistic about the money

Today, most AI crawlers don't pay yet: they leave when they meet a price, just as they would at a block. The number of agents and apps that can pay with x402 is growing quickly, because it is the simplest way for software to buy something. Setting a price now means your content is protected today and earns as that traffic grows. It also gives you numbers: how often AI bots try to read you, and what.

How to start

With Penni you set prices per page or section in a dashboard, connect your site (a WordPress plugin, a Cloudflare Worker or middleware) and add a wallet address to receive payments. Penni verifies and settles every payment for €0.002, and never holds your money. Penni is a European company, running on EU servers (why that matters). Once it runs, the free x402 checker shows what AI agents see on any of your pages.