“Pay-per-crawl” addressed the first wave of LLM crawlers scraping content to train models. But the landscape has already shifted again. Given the pace of AI innovation this year, we’re entering the era of Agentic AI—autonomous agents that don’t just scrape content, but interact with it in real time.

The data from our 2025 Global Bot Security Report shows that this new AI traffic has quadrupled between January and August of this year. Trying to just block or tax this traffic is a race to the bottom. The old focus on pure protection is failing. For Agentic AI, the new strategic imperative is trust.

The real opportunity is to create new agentic experiences in order to engage with AI agents through verified, secure, and trust-based interactions.

So the question is: how do we move beyond the traditional pay-per-crawl model and build an ecosystem where we can safely control, monetize, and trust AI agents to be part of our business? The KYA+Pay model may be the answer.

What is the Know Your Agent (KYA+Pay) approach

KYA+Pay, short for Know Your Agent + Pay, is one of the possible answers to the emerging agentic commerce economy. This capability enables organizations to identify who’s behind every request and decide how those interactions should be governed and monetized.

Know Your Agent (KYA) is about true identity and visibility. Instead of treating all non-human traffic as a single ‘bot’ category, DataDome allows you to distinguish between different AI actors. KYA means you can identify who and which service or model is accessing your content, verify that it’s a legitimate and trusted agent (not a spoofed or malicious one), and log its activity in real time. 

Visibility is the foundation. Pay is the action you take on it. This is the ‘trust’ layer that bridges the gap between simply identifying an agent and defining its value to your business.

Pay is about control and value: Once KYA verifies who is at the door, ‘Pay’ gives you the power to set the house rules. It’s no longer an ‘all or nothing’ decision. This is where you move from security to strategy by granting secure access to the content through the DataDome trust layer. You define who can access what, at what rate, and under what commercial terms. Each verified interaction can now be tied to a specific business rule, whether it’s free access, rate-limiting, or a direct payment, turning your content into a secure, monetizable asset.

Applying KYA+Pay to trusted & monetized AI traffic

To make this vision possible, DataDome and Skyfire have partnered. Our integration operationalizes the complete KYA+Pay model, which is built on two components. 

First, the KYA (Know Your Agent) token provides the critical visibility layer, allowing you to identify and verify every agent through DataDome’s AI-detection engine. Second, the Pay token provides the control layer, handling the payment and policy information for each interaction.

The DataDome x Skyfire integration links these two, tying DataDome’s security and trust layer to Skyfire’s verified, token-based identity and monetization tokens to create a single, secure, and trusted layer for all AI agents’ interactions.

How it works

As always, customers remain in control. From the DataDome dashboard, they can easily enable the Skyfire workflow and define how selected AI agents interact with their content.

Once the workflow is enabled, the AI agent interaction is simple and secure. An agent requesting access to DataDome-protected resources must first obtain a KYA, Pay, or KYA+Pay token from Skyfire via API or their MCP server. 

When the agent makes its request, it presents this token within a request header. DataDome’s agent trust layer validates that token in milliseconds, confirming the request comes from an identified, authorized and/or paying source.

This real-time validation results in an immediate decision:

• If the token is validated: Access is granted. The interaction is automatically logged as a monetize event in DataDome’s dashboard for full visibility.
• If the token is invalid or missing: The request is blocked instantly by DataDome. This ensures your protection against unauthorized access or scraping attempts remains ironclad. We provide a custom response for the AI agent to be able to adapt.

With this process, DataDome remains the security and trust layer.

Our advanced multi-layered AI detection is always the first line of defense. Taking a Zero Trust approach, DataDome inspects every request, every time, in real time. Even an agent with a valid token must pass this detection check first. This guarantees the trusted flow applies exclusively to authenticated and paying partners.

The outcome is powered by DataDome’s security and trust enforcement layer:  AI agent interactions are not just identified (KYA) and monetized (Pay), they are also verified, secure, and enforced under your own terms.

Why DataDome + Skyfire: See every agent. Get paid for every interaction.

The partnership between DataDome and Skyfire delivers a complete solution for managing and monetizing AI traffic—combining visibility, granular control policy, security, and full commercial flexibility. 

It gives businesses the tools to understand who’s accessing their content, control how it’s used, and generate value from every verified AI interaction.

Visibility and control

At the core of the integration is complete transparency. 

Through the DataDome dashboard, organizations gain a unified view of all AI agent activity—whether paid, unpaid, verified, or blocked. Every request is tracked in real time, showing exactly which agents are accessing your content, how often, and under what terms. Detailed analytics reveal behavior patterns and monetization performance, allowing you to understand which AI agents bring value and which should be restricted. 

Security without compromise

Your first line of defense is our advanced AI-detection, which every request must pass, even those with a valid KYA+Pay token. Only after our detection verifies the agent’s legitimacy is the token checked against your monetization rules. This multi-layered protection prevents unauthorized access, token misuse or reuse, and bypass attempts before they can compromise your infrastructure. By continuously validating access in real-time, we ensure your content, APIs, and data are secured against AI threats.

Flexible monetization

The DataDome and Skyfire partnership offers a solution that goes beyond traditional payment methods like “pay-per-crawl” or set licensing fees for content. It gives businesses the power to set up flexible pricing plans that are tailored to different situations. For example, a company might charge a news-scraping bot $0.001 per article, an e-commerce AI bot $0.01 for each price check, or even give free access to bots that provide a mutual benefit. 

This shift turns AI agent traffic into a dependable, growing source of income that perfectly fits your overall business plan and brand reputation.

Infrastructure independence

The solution works everywhere, no matter your stack, CDN, platform, or hosting environment. You can secure and monetize AI access everywhere with a single, unified policy. The architecture scales effortlessly as traffic grows, ensuring consistent performance, protection, and monetization as your business evolves.

The new AI agent economy requires a new way of thinking—one built on trust, not just keeping people out. DataDome acts as the trust layer for the KYA+Pay protocol, allowing you to move beyond simply blocking traffic. With DataDome, you control the rules, verify every agent, and turn trustworthy AI interactions into a predictable new source of revenue.

By partnering with Skyfire, DataDome gives businesses the visibility, security, and monetization tools they truly need to succeed in the agent economy.

Getting started

DataDome gives businesses the visibility, security, and monetization tools they truly need to succeed in the agent economy.

To begin using DataDome and Skyfire, make sure you have the following in place:

• You’ve chosen Skyfire as your traffic monetization partner in your DataDome account.
• You’ve created a Skyfire Seller account.
• Your DataDome server-side module is running the most up-to-date version for proper token collection.
• Ensure that Datadome Protection is enabled on the targeted resource

To learn more about the KYA+Pay protocol, read the Skyfire brief.
For a step-by-step guide on turning on the integration on your platform, see our integration documentation.