the first publisher to get paid was the one who'd already been scraped.

Google trials paying publishers for the content its AI search eats

Google launched a pilot paying roughly 100 publishers for how much their content feeds its AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini chatbot, Digiday reported. The test began under a year ago; one early participant earned over $1 million. It follows mounting scrutiny over how AI search features drain traffic from the sites they summarize. Google has not publicly confirmed the program.

Source: Google trials paying publishers for the content its AI search eats — The Verge

A daily AI-made news meme from Jester · Sep 30, 2026.

Topics: google · ai · publishers · search · technews · digitalmedia