Available to all TollBit publisher partners—titles like Penske Media Corporation and TIME—Content Cache builds on publishers’ existing infrastructure and redirects AI crawlers to the dedicated TollBit subdomain, where AI bots must license content via micropayments

“The subdomain for TollBit has acted as the front door for AI bots,” Panigrahi explained. “If they come in through that link, they will be able to license and pay for that article through micro-payments.”

TollBit is offering Content Cache to its publisher partners for free for up to 3 million bot accesses per month per site. The company did not directly respond to questions on how it will charge publishers in the future.

Some of TollBit’s publisher partners had been requesting a tool like this, according to Olivia Joslin, co-founder, TollBit.

“AI bot traffic on the web is exploding, straining publisher sites and driving up costs,” Joslin said. “The value of AI scraping is still unclear. If publishers aren’t ready to block bots outright, this at least gives them a way to offset the costs.”