Publisher Quickstart

Set up pay-per-crawl on your site in five minutes — detect AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, etc.), return HTTP 402, collect USDC micropayments on Base. Works standalone or as a non-custodial alternative to Cloudflare pay-per-crawl.

Xenarch vs Cloudflare pay-per-crawl

	Xenarch	Cloudflare pay-per-crawl
Custody	Non-custodial — USDC settles on-chain via splitter contract	Custodial — Cloudflare holds your earnings
Fee	0% (capped at 0.99% forever)	Cloudflare takes a cut
Settlement	USDC on Base L2, every payment on-chain	Fiat payout, off-chain ledger
Stack	Any stack (Python, Node, WordPress, Joomla, custom)	Cloudflare Workers required
Pricing	Per-page or per-path, publisher-defined	Cloudflare-defined

Prerequisites

A USDC wallet on Base (this is where you receive payments)
Your content served over HTTPS

Step 1: Register

npx xenarch register

This creates your publisher account and returns an API key (xk_pub_...).

Step 2: Add your site

npx xenarch site-add example.com

Returns a site token (st_...) and site ID. Save both.

Step 3: Set pricing

npx xenarch pricing example.com --default 0.003

Sets a default price of $0.003 per page. Add path-specific rules:

npx xenarch pricing example.com \
  --rule "/premium/*=0.01" \
  --rule "/api/*=0.05" \
  --rule "/public/*=0"

Step 4: Install middleware

Choose your integration:

FastAPI (Python)
WordPress
Custom server

pip install xenarch[fastapi]

Site-wide middleware (gates all bot traffic):

from xenarch.middleware import XenarchMiddleware

app.add_middleware(
    XenarchMiddleware,
    site_token="st_...",
    site_id="your-site-uuid",
    access_token_secret="your_secret",
    excluded_paths={"/healthz", "/docs"},
)

Per-route decorator (gates individual endpoints):

from xenarch.decorator import require_payment

gate = require_payment(
    site_token="st_...",
    site_id="your-site-uuid",
    access_token_secret="your_secret",
)

@app.get("/premium")
@gate
async def premium(request: Request):
    return {"content": "premium data"}

See the FastAPI middleware guide.

Implement the flow manually:

Detect bots via User-Agent matching
Call POST /v1/gates to create a gate
Return HTTP 402 with the gate response
When agents submit a Bearer token, verify it via POST /v1/access-tokens/verify

See the API reference.

Step 5: Add pay.json (optional)

Serve a pay.json file at /.well-known/pay.json so agents can discover your pricing without hitting a 402 first:

npx pay-json-generate \
  --wallet 0xYOUR_WALLET \
  --receiver 0xC6D3a6B6fcCD6319432CDB72819cf317E88662ae \
  --price 0.003 \
  --provider xenarch \
  --output .well-known/pay.json

See the pay.json spec.

How it works for your users

Humans: Pass through completely unaffected. The middleware only gates bot traffic.
AI agents with payment: Pay USDC, get an access token, access your content.
AI agents without payment: See HTTP 402 with payment instructions.

Check your earnings

npx xenarch stats your-site-id

​Xenarch vs Cloudflare pay-per-crawl

​Prerequisites

​Step 1: Register

​Step 2: Add your site

​Step 3: Set pricing

​Step 4: Install middleware

​Step 5: Add pay.json (optional)

​How it works for your users

​Check your earnings