Google's new AI Contribution pilot pays publishers when their pages help generate AI answers, but the terms are opaque—participants see a monthly earnings figure with no breakdown of how it was calculated. The author isn't part of Google's program, so he built his own experiment using the x402 protocol, charging one cent per page in testnet USDC. When an AI agent requests a page, the server responds with HTTP 402 (Payment Required), the agent checks the price, pays via blockchain, and receives a public transaction receipt. Five test payments went through on September 15, including one from Claude Code running on his machine. The whole thing works as a proof of concept, though all payments came from his own agents using worthless test tokens—no real crawlers are showing up with wallets yet. The core tension is between different ways publishers can monetize AI crawling. Google's approach requires trusting the platform to calculate fair value for content that "contributed significantly" to an answer, with no visibility into the math. Blocking crawlers entirely earns nothing and reduces visibility in AI training. Large publishers can negotiate individual licensing deals, but that doesn't scale. Cloudflare is moving from pay-per-crawl toward pay-per-use, arguing that actually using content is a better signal of value than just fetching it. But here's the catch: once content leaves your server, you can't independently verify whether it actually influenced an answer. With pay-per-crawl, the site owner can check the request and confirm payment themselves. With pay-per-use, you're taking the platform's word for what happened. The author's experiment with x402 demonstrates a middle ground. Instead of negotiating separate deals with every AI company or trusting platforms to self-report usage, a website sets a public price upfront. Any agent can pay that price and access the content, with a verifiable blockchain receipt. Cloudflare has its own Pay Per Crawl product in closed beta, but it requires bot operators to jump through verification hoops. The x402 protocol—which has existed as an unused HTTP status code since 1997—finally gives it a practical application. The author built this to understand how it works before Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway and Virtual Wallets go live, which are still in waitlist stages as of mid-September.