• Pew found that when Google shows an AI summary, users click a traditional result 8% of the time, roughly half the rate without a summary, and click a link inside the summary only 1%. The visit that funded the page mostly stops happening.
• Crawling is a poor proxy for value. One page can be fetched once and cited in thousands of answers, or fetched repeatedly and never used. Pay Per Use prices the citation instead of the fetch.
• More than half of crawl traffic from well-behaved bots re-fetches pages that have not changed. A signal saying nothing changed here saves the crawler compute and saves the site owner requests it never needed to serve.
• Publishers in the Ceramic pilot get answer-engine reporting: which queries surfaced their content, the exact page and snippet cited, and average ranking position — Search Console-style data for AI answers.
• The framing: an agent searches dozens of times to answer one question, so search becomes a utility rather than a destination, and the billable unit shifts from the crawl or the click to the outcome.

• AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.

If you're building AI search, answer-engine, or content-monetization infrastructure, this signals a real shift from pay-per-crawl to pay-per-citation economics that could change how you architect licensing and attribution for AI-consumed content.

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