Google quietly pays about 100 publishers for AI search content, with one reportedly earning over $1 million

The Verge's Emma Roth, citing reporting from The Information and Digiday, says Google has been running a pilot for less than a year that pays publishers according to how much their content contributes to AI Overviews, AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. About 100 publishers are participating.

Reported earnings vary widely. One early participant reportedly earned more than $1 million in a year, while a publisher that joined later reportedly made around $50,000 to $60,000. Google has not published the contribution metrics, eligibility criteria or rates, according to the coverage.

The pilot surfaced as Google faced pressure on several fronts: lawsuits from publishers, UK rules requiring an opt-out from AI search features and a European Union investigation into AI search's effect on web traffic. The day after this report, Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust suits from Chegg and Penske Media, finding that an expectation of traffic is not an agreement. The Verge's account of that ruling also cited the roughly 100-publisher pilot in its coverage.

Payments address a basic tension in AI search. Publishers historically supplied content in exchange for referral traffic. AI answers can satisfy queries without a click, weakening that exchange. Paying for contribution is one way to rebalance it, though at a scale far smaller than the number of sites whose content feeds AI answers.

For publishers, the key issues are whether contribution is measured transparently and auditably, and whether rates seen by early participants would extend beyond the first hundred seats. A program Google designs and controls may give it significant leverage over who gets paid and how much.

For regulators in the UK and EU, voluntary payments may be presented as an alternative to mandatory opt-outs or competition remedies. How those authorities weigh voluntary money against binding rules will shape the outcome. Rivals building AI answer engines may also face higher costs if paying for contributed content becomes the norm. More in our Google Gemini coverage and regulation coverage.