Could they collaborate with the website's creators that have websites behind cloudfare to allow their content to be accessed via an API in exchange of a compensation?.
This could be a way to compensate creators and AI companies be able to access content that's unreachable as it's protected by cloudfare
They are one step ahead of you:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/
Sort of though. Still private beta since July 2025.