Cloudflare's edge is a real AI-crawl chokepoint, but the price is the problem. FedRAMP High clearance on August 10 opens federal national-security workloads, and since traffic transits its edge, pay-per-crawl and bot rules are enforced there. Q2 revenue of $696M rose 36%, confirming the thesis without changing it. At 40x EV/sales, 182x forward earnings and a -8% GAAP operating margin, a de-rating needs no bad news; adding waits for ~$268. Direct lab-publisher licensing could bypass the toll. x.comÂ