WordPress Plugin · Paid by card or USDC · Vendor-neutral
The paywall where the content itself is the lock — one paywall for humans and bots. Encrypted, tagged, paid straight to you.
Robots.txt is a request. A user-agent check is a guess. Caches leak, feeds leak, and every scraper can wear a browser's name. The only monetisation that survives all of that is content that is not there in the clear until someone has paid you. That is what CrawlerToll ships — and the market is moving there whether publishers adapt or not.
CrawlerToll recognises 30 declared AI-crawler user-agents — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and more — applies your robots.txt licence lines, and issues HTTP 402 Payment Required with a structured payment offer. On WordPress it also seals premium content: the body is encrypted on the page and only unlocks against a payment made directly to you.
Readers pay by card on your own Stripe account; AI agents pay in USDC over x402 to your own wallet. CrawlerToll never touches the money and takes no cut.
For twenty years publishers have asked the visitor who they are and hoped for an honest answer. Crawlers lied, caches leaked, and the article was always right there in the HTML for anyone who cared to look. The fix is not a better question. It is
You mark a post premium and place the cut. From that moment the article body is not on the page in the clear — for anyone, human or bot — until a payment made directly to you releases the key.
The sealed body is AES-256-GCM ciphertext on the page. Caches, feeds, the REST API and scrapers that pretend to be people all get the same thing: the preview and an encrypted blob.
Machine-readable terms everywhere: RSL-style licence lines in robots.txt, a signed HTTP 402 offer with x402 headers for agents, and paywall structured data so search engines index the preview and understand the lock.
Readers pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay on your own Stripe account. AI agents pay in USDC straight into your wallet. CrawlerToll holds no payment credential and takes no cut — ever.
The key is released only against a settled payment, and a payment can't be used for a different purchase. If an unlock is interrupted, the same buyer can finish it with the same payment within 24 hours, while any pass it bought is still live; anything else is refused. If the unlock service can't be reached, no payment can start. If a card payment goes through and the article doesn't open, the reader's browser finishes it on the next try, without a second charge.
Free on wp.org with both payment rails, a traffic view of who is really at the door, a realised-revenue ledger and a refund workflow that never touches your money. Pro adds access tiers, bundles, metered free articles, webhooks and the full dashboard. Readers can carry an unlock to another device with a QR code.
The AI-crawler-monetization space consolidated around four standards in 2025–2026. CrawlerToll uses three of them: RSL-style licence lines, HTTP 402 and x402. It doesn't verify Web Bot Auth signatures; it recognises declared AI crawlers by their user agent.
RSL Technical Steering Committee
Really Simple Licensing — robots.txt vocabulary for AI-licensing terms. Backed by Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., Medium, Quora, O'Reilly, Stack Overflow, and Cloudflare.
IETF (draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture-05)
HTTP Message Signatures over Ed25519 keys served from /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. Implemented by Cloudflare, AWS WAF, OpenAI, and Google.
Cloudflare pay-per-crawl + x402
Payment Required response shape — Cloudflare ships >1 billion HTTP 402s per day. Structured Crawler-Price / Crawler-Price-Rail / Link headers.
x402 Foundation (Linux Foundation)
Coinbase + LF agent-payment rail. Founding members include Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Cloudflare, Circle.
Install the plugin, review the default policy and save. Enforcement is live from then on.
On ordinary pages AI crawlers are shown this price, or told the content isn't licensed until you can be paid. Paid access is sold per sealed article.
# WordPress admin → Plugins → Add New → search "CrawlerToll"
# Install + activate.
# Settings → CrawlerToll → review the default policy and save.
#
# Or via WP-CLI:
wp plugin install crawlertoll --activatePublishers use the WordPress plugin. Developers of AI agents use the SDK to pay for and read a sealed article.
30-crawler catalogue, RSL-style licence lines in robots.txt, sealed paywall with card + USDC rails, Pro revenue tooling. PHP 7.4+.
Install guide →@crawlertoll/sdk pays for one sealed article with a signed USDC payment on Base and reads it. You set a spending cap, and the SDK refuses to sign anything above it. Node 20+.
CrawlerToll doesn't try to be a marketplace, a payment processor or a vocabulary author. It seals your content, tells AI crawlers your terms, and lets readers and agents pay you directly: by card on your own Stripe account, or in USDC to your own wallet. Charthouse never touches your money.
Article text never leaves your server in the clear, card details go only to Stripe, and we hold no payment credentials. The unlock service keeps content keys, prices and unlock receipts, nothing more.
Read exactly what we store →A WordPress plugin, a hosted unlock service and an SDK for AI agents. Built and run by Charthouse Ltd in London.
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