Google's AI Publisher Payment Pilot Yields Tiny Payouts, Report Says

The pilot, called the AI contribution pilot, has admitted about 100 publishers, The Information reported. The pitch is that websites can receive payments from Google when their content materially contributes to AI-generated search results such as AI Overviews. Google has long resisted direct payments to publishers, arguing that websites receive traffic in exchange for allowing Google bots to scrape their content for search and knowledge graph tools. In the age of AI, that relationship is breaking down, which led to the pilot.

So far, publishers in the program are not getting much. The Information heard from several small and mid-sized publishers that Google's AI payments equal roughly one-tenth of one percent of their advertising revenue. The payments have been disappointing enough that several larger publishers have reportedly declined to participate. Those publishers hope that refusing to join the pilot will force Google to offer a more generous deal. Publishers both inside the program and watching from the sidelines have responded with skepticism.

Google's shift to AI-powered search has upended the way the world's largest search engine generates web traffic, rankling large and small publishers alike. In recent months, the company has experimented with paying publishers when their content appears in AI answers. The pilot is an early test of whether direct payments can change the traffic-for-scraping arrangement that has long governed Google's relationship with publishers.