- A speaker on No Priors said agents burn tokens reading pages built for humans, and proposed a separate machine path with payments built in.
- The speaker was unsure whether the technology or business models have caught up to agents doing tasks as seamlessly as a person.
A speaker on the No Priors podcast, in an episode published on 23 October 2026, argued that AI agents and people now share a web built only for people. The speaker's fix is a separate machine path with payment built in. Site owners, the speaker said, need a way to be compensated.
What was said
The speaker called this a messy middle: "we're in the messy middle right now where humans and agents are riding the same rails on the internet". A person reads a page and sees its ads. An agent can visit a thousand pages in the same time, so the speaker said a new economic model is needed.
Companies now sell layers that help an agent view a page. The speaker called that extra burning of tokens, the units of text AI models are billed for. APIs, which let computers talk directly, cover only a small fraction of what is online.
The proposal: a site knows its CPM, the ad rate per thousand views, so an agent could decide whether to read and whether to pay it. The speaker named HTTP 402, an old web code meant for payments, and said the speaker's company has released a gateway with wallets for agents. The aim, in the speaker's words: "We need to make it less costly for the site owners and we need to find a way for them to get compensated."
Why it matters
Our reading: the tension is that agents skip the ads that pay for pages, while owners still carry the cost of serving them. A pay-per-read exchange over HTTP 402 would answer that, but only if some things hold. Owners need to set a per-request price, as the CPM idea assumes. Agents need wallets to pay it. Owners also need to keep the option to refuse, since blocking is the leverage some use now. Owners can test the economics today: compare what agent visits cost you to serve with what a CPM-priced read would earn. Buyers can ask any agent vendor whether money reaches the site owner.
The other side
The speaker said they did not think everyone on the other side knows what the business outcome will look like. The speaker was also unsure whether the technology or business models have caught up to agents doing tasks as seamlessly as a person. Some owners simply block agents; the speaker pointed to Amazon saying no to agent shopping. Micropayments, the speaker noted, have always been two years away, and the speaker only thinks agents will push them forward. The speaker also described products from the speaker's own company, so this is a seller's view. The excerpts give no figures on what owners would earn.
Written by the WebPulse Newsroom with AI assistance, and checked by our editorial review: every quotation was verified against the recording's transcript. How we use AI.
The conversation this talking point comes from
- No Priors: Democratizing Security for the Agentic Web with CloudFlare CTO Dane Knecht (2026-10-23)
