Cloudflare has announced the acquisition of Human Native, a UK-based AI data marketplace. The deal shows the change in how internet content is used, shared, and paid for in the age of artificial intelligence.
Human Native works with publishers and developers to turn unstructured content like videos, images, and audio into clean and searchable data for AI systems. The key focus is licensed and trusted content. Instead of scraping data without permission, the company treats data as a valuable asset that deserves structure, transparency, and respect. This approach has already shown results, with some AI companies seeing better performance after switching to fully licensed data.
For Cloudflare, this acquisition is about fixing a broken system. The traditional internet model relied on a simple loop. Creators published content, platforms sent traffic back, and creators earned through ads or subscriptions. That system is now under pressure. AI bots crawl websites at a massive scale, often without clear rules or direct benefits for content owners.
Many publishers want more control over how their content is used by AI. Some want maximum visibility, while others want payment or limits on access. Over the past year, Cloudflare has been building tools to address this change on the internet. AI Crawl Control allows publishers to block or allow AI bots. Pay Per Crawl makes it possible to charge AI companies for access. Content Signals help creators clearly state how their content can be used. Cloudflare has also introduced the x402 protocol, which supports direct machine-to-machine payments.
By adding Human Native to its ecosystem, Cloudflare is going a step further. The company wants to replace messy and repeated web crawling with a cleaner model. Instead of bots scanning the web blindly, websites can share structured updates when their content changes. AI developers can subscribe to this data and receive it in real time. This improves data quality and reduces spam, duplicates, and illegal content.
The deal also supports Cloudflare’s long-term vision for new business models on the internet. The company is working on systems that allow automated services to pay each other directly. This could allow AI systems to pay publishers automatically for access to content, without human involvement in each transaction.
