Blocked bots are unpaid readers
Look at the robots file of almost any publisher today and you will find a growing list of crawlers and agents it turns away. The reasoning is simple. A human reader sees advertising, subscribes, comes back. A bot reads the page and leaves. It earns the site nothing, so the site blocks it.
That made sense while bot access could only be free. It makes less sense once a machine can pay.
Our page for publishers and content sites is now live. This post walks through the idea behind it, in the order the mechanism works.
A bot that can pay is a reader
x402 gives the web a way to charge per request. A server answers "402 Payment Required" with a price and a payTo address. The machine pays, in USDC on Base and Solana, and the content arrives. No account, no signup form, no subscription to manage.
For a publisher, that changes what a bot is. The same crawler you block today can become a reader that pays for each page it takes. You earn from machine readers the way you earn from advertising with human readers: by serving them the content they came for.
Nothing about this needs a new rail. The payment runs on rails that already exist. What changes is the decision to let the bot in.
Every such site becomes a seller
Once you charge per request, your site is an x402 seller. In practice that means two things: a payTo address that receives the money, and the resource URLs it charges for. That is the whole footprint.
It is also all the reader can see. A bot arriving at your paywall meets a price and an address. It has no way to tell your newsroom from a copy of your pages hosted by someone else, taking the payment and walking away.
Machines pay by policy
A human reader decides whom to trust by reputation: the masthead, the brand, what friends say. A machine has none of that. It decides what to pay by policy, written in advance by whoever operates it.
Those policies are getting stricter, because payments on the rail cannot be reversed. An endpoint nobody can vouch for is throttled, deprioritised or skipped. You never see that sale. It simply does not happen, and your logs show a bot that came, looked at the price and left.
So letting bots in is only half the move. The other half is giving their policies something to check.
What the free verdict adds
This is the seller side of KYA, "Know Your Agent": knowing who stands behind the parties in machine commerce. It is what ZadQ does.
- You pay to prove it. A registered issuer verifies the operator behind your site once, off the payment path. It signs an attestation that ties your
payToaddress and resource URLs to that verified operator, with a guarantee deposit behind it. - The bot checks it for free. The attestation travels in the 402 responses you already send. Before paying, the reader checks the signature on its own machine and gets one of three words: verified, not verified or unknown. Nobody pays to read the verdict.
- Nothing breaks for anyone else. A reader that cannot check simply proceeds as before, and the badge reads "unknown". Your paywall works the same with or without the verdict.
No personal data changes hands, and the reader never signs up. You hold no reader data you did not already have.
Who this is for, and who it is not
Attestation is built for sites with meaningful machine traffic. If bots read your site a handful of times a month, charging them per request is still open to you, and we will tell you plainly that you do not need us. If machine readers are a steady part of your traffic, or you publish content that agents come back for, the fit conversation is short.
The readers have a side too. Agent operators who want to be recognised by the sites they pay can register interest now; agent attestation opens with v1.
Where to start
Read the page for publishers and content sites, see how plans work, or, if you run the agents doing the reading, start with the agents page. When you know your volume and your rail, talk to us.