Artificial intelligence startups have been striking licensing and partnership deals with various publishers over the past year, gaining access to their content to help train their models and surface more accurate and timely content for their users. OpenAI now has agreements in place with multiple major publishers, for example, while startups such as Perplexity and ProRata.ai are touting models where publishers are compensated and credited when their content is used.
There’s been a notable exception from the AI-licensing wave, however. Other than its reported $60 million deal with Reddit, Google has so far refrained from compensating publishers directly for access to their content. Rather, its pitch to publishers around its AI products has been consistent with its approach to search over the past 20 years: Publishers should enable Google to access and crawl their content for free, and Google will send traffic their way in return.
Google has signaled to publishers behind closed doors that it is not interested in negotiating licenses for access to their content, Bloomberg reported last week. That’s putting publishers in a precarious but familiar position: They can either grant Google access to their content and hope it will send them traffic down the line, or block Google entirely and risk cutting off a valuable stream of traffic to their websites. Most publishers have opted to take the first path so far.