Cloudflare Teams Up with Leading Payments Companies to Secure and Scale Agentic Commerce
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), a leader in the connectivity cloud space, has announced a groundbreaking collaboration with some of the world’s largest payments companies to create a secure authentication layer for agentic commerce. This industry-wide effort leverages the Web Bot Auth protocol, enabling AI-driven shopping agents to interact with millions of merchants globally while maintaining trust, transparency, and security. By partnering with giants like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, Cloudflare is helping to lay the foundation for a new era of digital commerce where AI agents act as personal shoppers, transforming how consumers and businesses engage in online transactions.
The Rise of Agentic Commerce
Agentic commerce represents an emerging paradigm in online shopping where AI-powered agents act on behalf of consumers to handle the entire purchasing process—from product discovery to payment. While this innovation offers unprecedented convenience and efficiency for both shoppers and merchants, it also introduces unique challenges. Merchants need robust systems to differentiate between trusted AI agents and malicious bots, ensuring that legitimate transactions are processed seamlessly while fraudulent activity is blocked at the outset.
To address these challenges, Cloudflare and its partners have developed cutting-edge protocols that enable secure, transparent interactions between AI agents and merchants. At the heart of this effort is the Trusted Agent Protocol, co-developed by Cloudflare and Visa, which integrates Web Bot Auth into payment networks. This protocol allows merchants to verify the identity and intent of agent traffic, ensuring that only trusted agents can initiate purchases. Visa is incorporating these capabilities into its Visa Intelligent Commerce platform, while Mastercard is integrating Web Bot Auth into Mastercard Agent Pay, empowering merchants to identify trusted agents and deliver secure, personalized shopping experiences. Similarly, American Express will leverage Web Bot Auth to support its agentic commerce initiatives.
Building Trust Through Collaboration
The success of agentic commerce hinges on trust, security, and seamless interoperability across platforms. As AI agents begin to transact on behalf of consumers, ensuring that these interactions are safe and reliable becomes paramount. According to Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, “The future of commerce is agentic, and Cloudflare is building the trusted foundation for it. We’re directly enabling developers, merchants, and payments companies to innovate, and that starts by ensuring security is not an afterthought—it’s built in by design.”
Industry leaders echo this sentiment. Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa, emphasized the importance of collaboration in addressing the demands of this new era of commerce. “Merchants shouldn’t have to choose between blocking bots and serving real customers—Trusted Agent Protocol helps solve that.” Meanwhile, Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer at Mastercard, highlighted the role of partnerships in simplifying agent verification for merchants. “In collaboration with industry players like Cloudflare, we are ensuring a unified approach to agentic commerce that is scalable, secure, and widely adopted.”
For American Express, leveraging Web Bot Auth aligns with its commitment to fostering trust and accountability in digital interactions. “Trust and accountability are at the core of what we do,” said Luke Gebb, EVP & Head of Global Innovation at American Express. “This collaboration continues our commitment to ensuring safety and confidence in every digital interaction.”
Empowering Merchants with Web Bot Auth
At its core, Web Bot Auth enables AI agents to authenticate themselves, providing merchants with critical insights into the identity and intent of agent traffic. This framework ensures that merchants can securely accept payments from agents using various methods, including credit, debit, cryptocurrency, and more. By creating an authentication layer compatible with all major agentic frameworks, Web Bot Auth empowers merchants and developers to deploy agentic commerce at Internet-scale without compromising security or user experience.
Through Web Bot Auth, merchants can:
- Understand Customer Intent: Agents can communicate their purpose, whether it’s gathering product details or completing a purchase, ensuring clarity and alignment with customer needs.
- Maintain Personal Relationships: Even when an AI agent initiates a transaction, merchants can determine if the customer has an existing account or shopping history, preserving the personal touch that drives loyalty.
- Process Payments Seamlessly: Agents can utilize multiple payment methods, including traditional options like credit and debit cards, as well as emerging technologies like cryptocurrencies, offering flexibility and convenience.
Accelerating Adoption Through Open Protocols
Cloudflare’s contributions extend beyond Web Bot Auth. The company has also introduced open protocols such as the Agent Payments Protocol and the Cloudflare NET Dollar, alongside establishing the x402 Foundation with Coinbase. These initiatives aim to accelerate the adoption of agentic commerce by fostering interoperability and standardization across the ecosystem.
Additionally, Cloudflare is collaborating with other key players in the payments and technology sectors, including Adyen, Checkout.com, Circle, Fiserv, Microsoft, Nuvei, Shopify, Webflow, and Worldpay, to refine and expand the Web Bot Auth framework. These partnerships underscore the collective effort required to build a secure, scalable, and widely adopted system for agentic commerce.
A New Era of Digital Commerce
As the lines between human-driven and AI-driven transactions blur, the need for robust authentication and security measures becomes increasingly critical. Cloudflare’s collaboration with leading payments companies marks a significant step forward in addressing these challenges. By leveraging Web Bot Auth and other innovative protocols, the initiative ensures that agentic commerce is not only secure but also accessible to millions of merchants worldwide.
This partnership reflects a shared vision for the future of commerce—one where AI agents enhance the shopping experience while maintaining the highest standards of trust and transparency. With Cloudflare’s global network and expertise in cybersecurity, combined with the resources and reach of its partners, the stage is set for agentic commerce to unlock new opportunities for consumers and businesses alike.
For merchants, developers, and consumers, this collaboration promises to deliver a safer, more efficient, and more personalized digital commerce ecosystem. As agentic commerce continues to evolve, the work being done today by Cloudflare and its partners will serve as the cornerstone for a transformative shift in how we shop, pay, and connect online.
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company on a mission to help build a better Internet. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business.
Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations—from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.
Learn more about Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud at cloudflare.com/connectivity-cloud. Learn more about the latest Internet trends and insights at https://radar.cloudflare.com.
