With AI shaking nearly every foundation they stand on, can publishers actually count on Google to help?
That’s the question being bandied about ever since word spread that Google was starting an “AI contribution pilot” that might actually pay publishers for content used in Gemini, AI Overviews, and its other AI-generated responses.
“Google has been quietly scaling a pay-per-value AI licensing scheme for publishers,” Digiday’s Jessica Davies and Sara Guaglione wrote a few weeks ago, “but critics say the program looks less like a meaningful payout and more like a legal fig leaf.”
Google Search Console screenshot (Photo Source: Digiday)
According to Digiday’s finding, which included screenshots from within Google Search Console, dozens of publishers had been approached to participate in the program. Once in, publishers would see an AI earnings widget on their dashboard, showing payments based more heavily on “value than raw usage.” Follow-up reports on those who are getting paid found one early-adopting publisher making more than $1 million annually, while others are only making a few hundreds a month.
“Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response,” says the Digiday article. “Given the early stage of the program, Google is likely still figuring out how to determine the value each piece of content has for its AI-generated responses, and that’s a complicated equation no one in the industry has yet figured out.”