A new open standard wants to track how AI agents use publisher content – not just the request, but whether it influenced the response, got cited, reached the user, and drove engagement. The SPUR Coalition’s Content Telemetry spec is now open for public comment.

“We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.” (New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger)

Three publisher coalitions have already committed to three incompatible models, and whichever one becomes the default makes the other two marginal. (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)

Is this the end of licensing deals? Sam Altman told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that having AI agents paying micropayments per article crawled is his preferred model for compensating publishers. (Andre Deck, Nieman Lab)

A breakdown of the scraper economy: bulk harvesters, answer engines, search hybrids, and the infrastructure layer. The market hit $1 billion in 2025. Not one dollar flows back to publishers. (Matthew Scott Goldstein, LinkedIn)

“Not ‘how do I get paid for my articles by AI’ but ‘how do I architect my knowledge so it can reach customers I’ve never had access to before'”: A three-layer AI monetization framework, with O’Reilly as proof of concept. (Florent Daudens, AI in the News)

BBC, FT, Guardian, Sky News, and The Telegraph are launching Spur, a coalition to set shared licensing standards for AI use of journalism. Not a collective licensing body, but wants to shape what pricing looks like. More publishers welcome. (Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette)

Microsoft is launching a Publisher Content Marketplace to license articles into AI products like Copilot, promising publishers control, transparency, and usage-based payment for content that grounds conversational answers.

Sci-fi author and digital activist Cory Doctorow on the AI bubble: “The promise AI companies make to investors is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company. (…) But AI can’t do your job.”

Google is rolling out Preferred Sources globally and has unveiled new AI features as well as new partnerships with news publications. SPIEGEL is one of the partners. (Google)

In left-leaning media outlets like n+1, resistance against AI is taking shape: “When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. (…) There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”

A visit to the nonprofit that powers most of today’s AI training: Common Crawl ingests the web, journalism and all, unapologetically. The article falls a bit short on fair use and other archives, but it’s a good read. (Alex Reisner, The Atlantic)

The current AI browser landscape and what it means for publishers: How content is used, and whether compensation or licensing is on the table. (Bertrand de Volontat, Nordot)

On Cloudflare’s very surprising ideas about AI and the future of web publishing: “That’s my counterprosal: AI should pay for the stuff it already uses, and people should keep putting up paywalls.” (Paul Ford, Aboard)

AI bots endlessly scrape publisher sites, causing costly downtime and meager traffic. (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)