AWS just made AI bot monetization a WAF setting (opens in new tab)

The debate about how to monetize AI crawler traffic has been running for two years. AWS just turned it into a checkbox in the WAF console. AWS WAF's new AI traffic monetization feature — part of its Bot Control suite — lets publishers set a price for AI bot and agent access, collect payment at the edge, and serve the response in a single request cycle. No custom middleware. No bespoke auth flows. CloudFront plus config. "When an AI bot or agent requests a protected resource like an article, a...