You Can Now Charge ChatGPT Per Crawl on Your WooCommerce Store
Cloudflare customers are now sending over 1 billion HTTP 402 Payment Required responses to AI crawlers per day, and AI Crawl Control is free on every Cloudflare plan. For a WooCommerce store, the right configuration is not “block all AI” or “allow all AI” — it is a per-crawler policy that allows the search and shopping crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) that drive 15.9% converting referral traffic, charges or blocks the training-only crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended) that consume bandwidth without returning referrals, and prices crawls at $0.01-$0.05 to send a licensing signal rather than expecting material revenue. The decision becomes data-driven once Transmute Engine feeds bot-vs-human traffic into BigQuery alongside conversion data.