AI assistants answer questions using text taken from websites, including small ones. A field guide published on November 2, 2026 by a working group at Prebid.org, an advertising industry body, maps four ways the companies behind those assistants pay for it.

The prices start at a tenth of a cent per page. Before you count the money, read who sets that price.

What the Field Guide Maps

The guide is called “Getting Paid in the AI Era,” and it sets out the routes by which money reaches a site owner when a machine rather than a person reads a page.

The guide names four models: pay per access, pay per use, revenue share and direct deals. An earlier Prebid article, “Who Gets Paid When an AI Reads Your Page?”, adds that brand-funded placements, where advertisers pay to shape how AI assistants describe them, sit outside the four and can run alongside any of them.

The distinction that matters for a site owner is simpler. Pay per access prices the fetch: a crawler pays each time it loads a page. Pay per use prices what the AI does with it: summarize, display or cite. Revenue share lets the operator decide your cut. A direct deal puts that in a contract.

One more disclosure: both named authors work for vendors operating in this market. The guide is useful and it is not neutral.

Why a Tenth of a Cent Is the Number to Remember

A tenth of a cent is the floor price in Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl documentation, which lets a site charge from $0.001 per page. Cloudflare acts as merchant of record, and does not publish the share it keeps.

Run that arithmetic on a small business site. A hundred pages crawled a thousand times a month, at the floor price, is a hundred dollars before anyone’s cut. A fifteen-page site is lunch money.

The product is also a beta that the largest AI companies have not committed to joining. A price list is not revenue until somebody agrees to pay it.

What Repeats Across All Four Models

In most of these arrangements the rate, the revenue share or the disclosure is set by the intermediary, not by the owner of the content. The site owner chooses whether to take part.

Direct deals are the exception, and the guide is candid that they take months to negotiate and go mainly to the largest publishers. A site with fifteen pages has nothing to negotiate with, so in practice three of the four models are the only ones on offer and none of them involves a conversation about price.

This is an observation, not a trend. One field guide and one vendor’s price floor are not enough to establish where this market settles, and the guide itself does not estimate total payouts for any model. Anyone telling you the AI licensing economy has arrived is ahead of the evidence.

What a Small Business Can Actually Decide

A small business is almost certainly not going to be paid for its content. The real decision is narrower, and it is yours: do you let AI crawlers read the site at all?

Both answers cost something. Block them and you reduce the chance of being named when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation in your category. Allow them and you get that visibility without payment.

For most local businesses the second trade is the better one, because being recommended to a buyer is worth more than a theoretical tenth of a cent. For many small sites, a single new customer from an assistant’s recommendation could be worth more than a year of crawl fees at the floor price. That is the whole case for treating AI search as a visibility channel rather than a revenue one.

The practical step is to find out what your site does today. Your host or CDN may already block some AI crawlers by default, which means the decision may have been made for you by a setting you have never seen. Ask whoever maintains your website to tell you what the current rule is.

Conclusion

Four payment models exist on paper. For a small business the money in them is negligible, the terms belong to someone else, and the only decision that matters is whether machines may read your pages.

Make that decision deliberately rather than inheriting it from a default. If you want the upside instead of the invoice, the work is getting your business found in AI search, not waiting for a check.