My website charged AI agents a penny per page. I watched Claude pay it

Suganthan Mohanadasan built a live experiment that makes a website charge AI agents $0.01 per page and observed test payments, including one from Claude Code, settle on-chain. Motivated by Google’s AI contribution pilot - which reports earnings without detailed breakdowns - the experiment explores a pay-per-crawl/pay-per-use alternative where the buyer pays before content is released and the seller receives a public receipt. Five testnet USDC payments settled on 15 September, all initiated by the site owner’s agents (no external crawlers paid yet). The write-up contrasts blocking, licensing deals, and opaque platform revenue-sharing, arguing that a priced request gives sites a verifiable commercial exchange rather than relying on platform-reported contributions.

Technically, the demo implements the x402 proposal using HTTP 402 Payment Required: a priced request returns a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header, the agent retries with a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE, a payment facilitator (the demo used Coinbase via x402.org) settles the transfer on-chain, and the server returns the content plus a PAYMENT-RESPONSE receipt. The example offer requests 10000 units (0.01 USDC) on eip155:84532 (Base Sepolia) to a burner address. The demo runs on a Cloudflare Worker with Hono and x402 middleware at paid.suganthan.com, exposing a free landing page, a priced article route, and an earnings page listing timestamps, payer addresses and transaction hashes. The x402 Foundation now sits under the Linux Foundation with major industry backers, suggesting broader industry momentum for pay-per-use web monetization.