How do I make AI crawlers pay to read my WordPress site?
Short answer: Install a WordPress plugin that answers AI crawlers and agents with an x402 price instead of the page. The Penni plugin does this: people and search engines read for free, known AI bots and scripts get 402 Payment Required, and those that pay get the page, with the money going straight to your wallet.
Try Penni free in test mode · Check any URL with the free x402 checker
If you run a blog, a magazine or a knowledge site on WordPress, a growing share of your traffic is AI: crawlers collecting training data and assistants fetching pages to answer someone's question. They use your server and your writing, and send nobody back.
What a paywall for AI looks like
Instead of blocking AI bots, the Penni plugin asks them to pay. It looks at each request:
- A person in a browser gets the normal page, for free.
- Google, Bing and link previews get the normal page, so your SEO is unchanged.
- Known AI crawlers and agents (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others), and scripts that don't ask for an HTML page, get
402 Payment Requiredwith your price. - An agent that pays gets the page in the same request; the payment lands in your wallet.
Want everyone to pay instead, people included? Switch the plugin to "Everyone": visitors then see a clear payment page with a "Pay with wallet" button that works with browser wallets such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet and Phantom.
Prices per page or section
You set prices in the Penni dashboard, not in WordPress: a default price plus rules such as /premium/** costs €0.25 or /news/* is free. Single posts can be marked "Always free". Changes reach your site within a minute.
Never charged
- Logged-in editors and admins, the admin area, login, cron and AJAX.
robots.txt, sitemaps and 404 pages.- Feeds and the REST API, unless you choose to charge them.
- IP addresses and user agents you allow-list.
Setup in five minutes
- Create a free Penni account and add your site.
- Add a wallet address to receive payments, or generate one in the dashboard.
- Install the Penni plugin, paste your site ID and API key, and click "Test connection".
- Try it in test mode with free test tokens, then switch to live.
See the WordPress guide for details, and how it works or why Penni for the bigger picture. Penni charges €0.002 per successful payment, with no subscription. When the plugin is on, paste one of your post URLs into the free x402 checker to see what an AI agent gets.
Does it slow my site down for readers?
No. Readers get the normal page. The plugin keeps your price list in a cache, refreshes it in the background, and only calls Penni per request when a payment comes in.
Does it work with caching plugins?
Yes. Payment answers and paid pages are never cached. A page cache that serves stored pages before WordPress runs could hand the free copy to an AI bot, so the plugin's settings list the AI user agents to add to your cache's "never cache" list, or can stop caching priced pages altogether.
Is the plugin free?
Yes, the plugin is free and open source (GPL). Penni's only fee is €0.002 per payment that reaches your wallet.