Will AI agents pay for news? BeInCrypto CEO Alena Afanaseva put that question to the media industry as publishers watch search traffic shrink.
Google Search referrals to more than 2,500 news sites fell 33% between November 2024 and November 2025, according to Chartbeat data cited by the Reuters Institute. ChatGPT referrals are growing, but Google still sends about 500 times as many readers.
BeInCrypto Research unit’s State of AI Agent Payments 2026 report shows the payment rails already work, but at very small values.
A New Kind of Paying Reader
BeInCrypto recently interviewed Yana Prikhodchenko, who ran Cointelegraph for almost five years before becoming co-founder and CEO of a company building infrastructure for AI agents.
Prikhodchenko argues that agents could buy individual articles through the x402 payment standard, paying in stablecoins without a subscription. Short updates would cost less than exclusive reporting or original analysis.
“The main goal is not just to rank high, but to become the source for AI agents,” she told BeInCrypto.
Millions of Payments, Little Money
Between July 23 and August 26, the team tracked 6.4 million x402 payments on Solana and Base. Together, they moved $119,947.
Some 90.8% of transfers were below one cent, carrying only 10.7% of the value.
Activity was also highly concentrated. Solana recorded 94.5% of all transactions in just eight days, from August 19 to 26.
“The plumbing and infrastructure is there… but the actual economic activity is pretty small relatively speaking and fairly irregular and intermittent,” Michael Thoma, Head of Research at BeInCrypto, said during the Market Intelligence Experts Council discussion with Dune.
Agents Buy Information, Not Articles
Agents already pay for information, just in small pieces. At the research snapshot, the x402 catalogue listed 14,791 paid resources across 1,610 hostnames.
The most-called one was an AI-generated token safety check priced at two cents.
Web searches, Twitter searches and web page reads also made the top ten. No news product did.
Still, Damon Mao, Head of Web3 Solutions Architect at AWS, said in the report that early adoption includes “paywalled content” alongside data feeds and model inference.
Will Papper, Director of Product for Agent Payments at Cloudflare, expects digital goods to be adopted quickly “because fulfillment is easy to verify.”
Will AI Agents Pay for News: What Publishers Should Watch
Only a fifth of digital leaders surveyed by the Reuters Institute expect AI licensing deals to bring substantial revenue. Agent payments could open a second path.
So far, however, the data shows agents buying searches and data checks rather than articles.
“For businesses, high transaction counts alone are a poor guide to revenue potential. What matters is how much customers spend, and whether they return,” BeInCrypto Research notes.
For 2027, Thoma wants to see steady growth in agents, payments, and values, spreading beyond “crypto enthusiasts maybe chasing a trend.”
