According to The Information, Google has been trialling a programme for less than a year that pays around 100 publishers on a pro rata basis according to the use of their content in its AI-generated responses.
Google has quietly launched a pilot program that pays web publishers for the share their content takes in the responses of its AI tools: AI Overviews summaries, AI search mode and the Gemini chatbot. According to The Information, taken up by The Verge, about a hundred publishers are participating; the test started less than a year ago and was first spotted by Digiday.
Very unequal amounts
The sums vary greatly. An early participant would have earned more than a million dollars in a year, another, more recently, between $50,000 and $60,000. For many small sites, the payments would be limited to a few thousand dollars over several months, or less than 0.1% of their advertising revenue — which pushes large groups to stay away to negotiate more.
The program marks a turnaround for Google, which has long maintained that the traffic sent to sites is enough to pay publishers. The drop in this traffic since the arrival of AI summaries has earned it lawsuits and the attention of regulators: the United Kingdom imposed an opt-out option for publishers in June, and the European Union has opened an investigation into the impact of these features.
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