Charge AI Rent For My Content

My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.

Somewhere out there, right now, a bot is reading this. Hi, robots!

Not a person. A crawler, working for a company worth more than most countries, pulling my sentences into a system that will later answer someone's question with them. That someone will never click through. Never see my name. Never know I exist.

And I get nothing.

Here's my idea. Simple, probably naive: AI companies should pay rent for my content.

Not a one-time fee. Not a lawsuit settlement three years from now. Rent. Every month, for every site they crawl and keep using.

The old deal is... dead

The old internet ran on a trade. Google crawls your site, Google sends you readers, it's kind of a win-win. That's how I built a career. Write something reasonably good, rank for it, get traffic, sometimes get paid for the traffic.

AI broke that second half of that trade pretty quickly while still keeping the first half. The crawling didn't stop. If anything it got way worse, bots hitting my server at all hours, over and over, for pages that haven't changed in months. What stopped is whether I got something back.

A study published this year, a real field experiment, not a vendor's marketing blog, found that when Google shows an AI Overview instead of links, clicks to the actual sites drop by about 40 percent. People get their answer and leave. Nobody comes to say thanks.

So the trade is somewhat broken. Fine. Trades get renegotiated all the time. My problem is with what's supposedly replacing it.

Rent, not a toll

Cloudflare already tried something close to this. Pay per crawl, they called it. A bot fetches your page, it pays a fraction of a cent. Sounds nice on paper. In practice it prices the wrong thing. One fetch of my site can feed a million answers, and I still only get that same fraction of a cent. Fetch me a thousand times for a page nobody ever quotes, and nobody wins either.

What I want is closer to what a landlord charges. Not "you touched the doorknob, that's five cents." A flat, recurring rent for ongoing access and use. An AI company that keeps pulling from my archive, keeps answering questions with my work folded into the response, pays me monthly. Like a subscription, except I'm the one getting paid instead of paying it for once.

Would I set the number too high? Probably. Would OpenAI or Google ever agree to it? Almost certainly not, not without someone forcing them. But that's exactly why it has to be rent and not a favor. Landlords don't ask nicely either.

Why it might work, a little

I'm not pulling this completely out of thin air. The foundation for it already exists, even if nobody has built the whole thing yet.

There's now a standard, RSL, that lets any site publish a machine-readable price in its robots.txt. A crawler can read what I charge for my content to crawl and use.

Sam Altman himself floated a version of this on a podcast this year: an AI agent could pay a small fee to read an article and summarize it, publisher sets the price. And after Anthropic got hit with a 1.5 billion dollar copyright settlement for training on pirated books, every AI company suddenly has a very concrete reason to want a clean, licensed way to pay for content instead of getting sued for it. Understandably so.

None of that is my rent model exactly. It's closer, though, than it was two years ago. Somebody with more leverage than me could build it tomorrow if they wanted to.

Why it probably won't happen

Every payment system built so far for this runs through a middleman, and the middleman takes a cut that would make Spotify blush. Estimates put Cloudflare's take at around 30 percent of whatever flows through its version of this. My rent idea has the exact same problem baked in. Somebody has to collect the money and hand it out, and that somebody will not do it for free. Nope.

Micropayments have also just never worked. Flattr tried and died. A dozen others tried and died with it. Maybe agent-to-agent payments are different because no human has to sit there deciding whether five cents is worth it. Maybe.

And underneath all of it sits the one question. Whether training an AI on my writing without asking is even illegal in the first place. Courts are still deciding that, case by case, right now, and the U.S. government just filed a brief this week arguing that a healthy AI industry matters more than my copyright does. If the courts agree, none of this is even a negotiation. It's a favor. And I don't think I'm getting one.

The Bottom Line

I don't know if AI rent ever becomes a real thing. I'd love to see it, though.

I've written before about how much of what we do online is rented, not owned, and this would flip that for once, me collecting instead of paying.

I doubt it happens the way I just described it. But somebody's going to get paid for what these models are built on, I hope.

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