Google seeks licensing talks with information teams, following AI rivals

By Julia Love and Hannah Miller, Bloomberg

“We’ve said that we’re exploring and experimenting with new types of partnerships and product experiences, but we aren’t sharing details about specific plans or conversations at this time,” a Google spokesperson stated in an announcement.

Getting Alphabet Inc.’s Google to pay for content material for AI initiatives may very well be an enormous win for struggling media corporations, which have misplaced readers and advertisers to digital retailers for years and consider synthetic intelligence as a brand new, doubtlessly existential menace. Excluding a partnership with the Related Press earlier this 12 months and a 2024 pact with Reddit, Google has principally sat on the sidelines whereas AI rivals strike offers with publishers.

Startups Perplexity AI Inc. and OpenAI have each began paying publishers to make use of their content material of their chatbots, giving the media corporations a much-needed infusion of income.

Google’s licensing mission is tailor-made to particular merchandise, based on one other individual acquainted with the plan. They didn’t share further particulars of this system, similar to potential phrases.

Google cites articles and on-line retailers in its AI Overviews, that are quick, AI-generated responses that prime many search outcomes. Whereas publishers imagine these summaries have lower site visitors to their web sites, they’ve been hesitant to defend their content material from Google’s AI instruments for worry of wounding their visibility within the firm’s search outcomes.

In July, Cloudflare Inc., an online infrastructure and safety firm, introduced a “pay per crawl” program that lets creators invoice AI companies for entry to their content material.

“Google still thinks they’re special and that they don’t have to play by the same rules that the rest of the industry does,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated in an interview. “Eventually, Google will get in line with what the large AI companies have been saying for a long time, which is that ultimately content providers need to be paid for their content.”

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Initially Printed: July 22, 2025 at 7:52 AM PDT