Google has started negotiations with news publishers to pay for content used in its artificial intelligence products. Julia Love and Hannah Miller of Bloomberg report that this move follows competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity AI, who already have such licensing deals in place.
According to the report, Google plans to launch a pilot program with approximately 20 national news outlets. While a Google spokesperson confirmed the company is “exploring and experimenting with new types of partnerships,” they did not share further details.
For the struggling media industry, payments from Google could offer a significant new revenue stream. Many publishers have lost readers and advertising to digital platforms and view AI as a new threat. They are concerned that features like Google’s AI Overviews, which provide AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, reduce traffic to their websites. Publishers have been hesitant to block Google’s AI tools because they fear it would harm their visibility in search results.
The media industry has become more vocal about the need for compensation. David Gehring, a media consultant, told Bloomberg that tech platforms realize their access to unlimited web data is ending, and so they “need to have licensing relationships in place”. Danielle Coffey, president of the News/Media Alliance, said she is focused on ensuring the industry has “a legally sustainable right to compensation” for its valuable content.