Cloudflare's CEO says OpenAI pays for hints that tell its crawler when pages change, and sites may charge agents less when they explain their visits.

Cloudflare recorded its first revenue from what it calls Act 4 products in the third quarter, co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said on the company’s earnings call. Act 4 covers the products meant to help create a new business model for the internet.

He also said OpenAI is paying for hints that tell its crawler when web pages change. For customers that want more traffic from AI agents, Cloudflare is helping with what he described as “sort of the new version of SEO.”

Prince gave no figure for Act 4 revenue on the call. Cloudflare’s third-quarter results release, which reported revenue of $782.5 million, up 39% year over year, doesn’t break it out either.

A Goldman Sachs analyst asked when it will be time for Act 4 products to generate meaningful revenue. Prince replied that Cloudflare is already “recognizing significant amounts of revenue” due to the efficiency it brings to AI agents’ visits to websites. As an example, he pointed to the partnership with OpenAI that was explained during Cloudflare’s August earnings call.

He also described how under the partnership, Cloudflare provides OpenAI with information as to when a webpage has been updated (for example, a restaurant updates their pricing), so OpenAI’s crawler doesn’t have to keep going back and re-fetching the same webpage.

“OpenAI is paying for that,” he said, adding that he expects other AI companies to do the same.

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