Charge AI bots that crawl your site

agent402-tollbooth is an open-source, self-hostable pay-per-crawl gate. Drop it in front of any Node site and AI crawlers pay USDC on Base — or burn CPU — to read your content. Humans browse free. 30-min walkthrough →

Managing multiple sites or running an SEO agency? Multi-site rollup, alerts, white-label dashboard, 20% partner program. Tollbooth Cloud →

1 · Configure

Your wallet (Base, USDC) Price per request Mode

Tip: leave it in observe mode for 24h. Your dashboard at /__tollbooth will show what's actually crawling you before you ever charge anyone.

2 · Install

npm install agent402-tollbooth

That's it. Start your server normally. Add a TOLLBOOTH_STATS_TOKEN env var to view the dashboard at /__tollbooth?token=<your token>.

3 · Roll out safely

Phase 1 · 24h

mode: "observe"

Nothing is blocked. Dashboard shows you what's crawling and what you would charge.

Phase 2 · ongoing

mode: "bots"

Known AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Perplexity, …) get 402. Humans + Googlebot pass.

Phase 3 · optional

mode: "all" / "strict"

Catch unidentified bots too. Adaptive proof-of-work keeps the page reachable for legit edge cases.

Not running Express?

Cloudflare WorkerOne wrangler deploy. KV-backed. Next.js middlewareOne file in middleware.ts. Docker reverse proxyAny backend, any language. WordPress plugin betaDrop-in PHP. Settings → Agent402 Tollbooth.

30-min walkthrough README + reference node demo.js npm