AI agents are beginning to make micropayments for digital content through the x402 payment standard, but so far they are buying data and information rather than news articles, according to research from BeInCrypto.
The development comes as publishers face declining search referrals. Google Search sent 33% fewer readers to more than 2,500 news sites between November 2024 and November 2025, according to Chartbeat data cited by the Reuters Institute. While ChatGPT referrals are growing, Google still drives approximately 500 times as many readers to news sites.
Small but Growing Payment Activity
Between July 23 and August 26, researchers tracked 6.4 million x402 payments on Solana and Base blockchains, totaling $119,947. However, the activity concentrated heavily: 90.8% of transfers were below one cent, and 94.5% of all transactions occurred in just eight days.
The x402 catalogue contained 14,791 paid resources across 1,610 hostnames. The most-called resource was an AI-generated token safety check priced at two cents. Web searches, Twitter searches, and web page reads ranked among the top ten most-used paid resources, but no news products appeared in the list.
Alternative Revenue Path for Publishers
Yana Prikhodchenko, former CEO of Cointelegraph and now co-founder of an infrastructure company for AI agents, proposed that publishers could sell individual articles through x402 payments. Short updates would cost less than exclusive reporting or original analysis, eliminating the need for subscriptions.
Damon Mao, Head of Web3 Solutions Architect at AWS, noted that early x402 adoption includes paywalled content alongside data feeds and model inference. Will Papper, Director of Product for Agent Payments at Cloudflare, suggested digital goods will be adopted quickly because fulfillment is easy to verify.
Only one-fifth of digital leaders surveyed by the Reuters Institute expect AI licensing deals to generate substantial revenue, suggesting agent payments could offer a supplementary income stream for publishers.
BeInCrypto Research cautioned that transaction volume alone does not indicate revenue potential. The research unit plans to track whether agent payments grow consistently in 2027 and expand beyond early cryptocurrency adopters.
