Google Is Paying About 100 Digital Publishers for AI Overviews

Google has been paying roughly 100 digital publishers for how much their content contributes to AI-powered answers to search and other products, according to people familiar with tests. The pilot program signals a further shift by the company toward paying publishers for content that shows up in its powerful search engine.

Google has historically taken the attitude that it shouldn’t pay publishers whose content answers users’ queries, on the grounds that the questions direct traffic to their websites. But the advent of AI-powered summaries, called AI Overviews, has drastically reduced the amount of traffic Google’s search refers to websites, prompting widespread complaints about Google, including lawsuits from some publishers.

The program is unlikely to silence those complaints, however. For several small to midsize blogs and websites testing the programs, the payments amount to less than one-tenth of 1% of their advertising revenue, according to people familiar with the payouts. The small scale of the payouts has deterred some larger ones from using the program, three people familiar with the matter said. By holding out, they hope to pressure Google and others to pay more for content used by AI.

Other publishers see the latest program as a chance to learn what content Google’s AI values and adapt theirs to match. An executive at one participating publisher said Google appears to be testing a new deal in which it uses publishers’ content and decides for itself what that content is worth.

Google started testing the program involving its AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini chatbot less than a year ago, according to a person close to Google. Payments have varied widely. One publisher that joined a few months ago has earned about $50,000 to $60,000 so far, which doesn’t represent that much of its business, the publisher said. Another that joined early on is earning more than $1 million a year, which represents a bigger slice of its revenue, according to people familiar with the program. Smaller sites have earned less than $1,000 over several months, according to those people.

Publishers can track how often their content is used and how much they’re paid through Google Search Console, a tool that helps them measure and monitor the website’s performance and search traffic.

If enough publishers stick with it, the program could represent a model for how other AI companies handle websites whose content feeds their models’ answers.

Digiday first reported on the existence of the program but hasn’t reported on the payment amounts, the number of publishers in the program and other details.

Publisher Complaints

Google’s attitude to paying publishers has evolved over time. After resisting for many years, and under pressure from regulators and lawmakers internationally, it has struck licensing and partnership agreements in recent years to pay publishers for access and use of their content in its products. Things changed again when tech firms began training AI models. For a time, Google was slow to pay publishers for using their models in AI, although it inked a deal in 2024 to license Reddit’s data for training its Gemini model.

Then in January 2025, Google also struck a deal with the Associated Press to provide a real-time news feed to the Gemini app. And in recent months, it started a program to pay publishers such as The Washington Post and The Guardian to make their content more visible in AI-powered article overviews in Google News.

The AI Overviews program follows complaints by publishers that the emergence of Google AI products summarizing web answers has reduced the need for people to visit their websites. World History Encyclopedia, an online reference site that isn’t part of the pilot, says its Google traffic has fallen 25% to 35% in each of the past two years across its site, and is down about 50% from 2024. Pages with an AI Overview were hit hardest, said Jan van der Crabben, World History Encyclopedia founder.

Google, like other model makers, needs these web publishers to stay active. Google models trained on internet content lose their relevancy after a while. To keep its answers current and accurate, the model checks them against content it finds in Google’s search and revises them to reduce hallucinations, when the model confidently produces an answer that is plainly wrong.

Not every source counts equally under the program. For example, if the model consulted 100 websites for an answer, perhaps only five, or 5%, would meaningfully improve that response.

Some participants said they still don’t know how their payments are calculated, including what counts as a meaningful contribution or which kinds of content are valued most, and said payments can change from month to month without explanation.

Patterns are starting to emerge, however. Content on topics that are less widely covered online but draw strong user interest, such as anime and gaming, appear to earn more, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The experiment is running as regulators step up pressure on Google over how it uses publishers’ content. Penske Media sued Google twice in four months: first in September 2025, alleging that AI Overviews siphoned traffic and cut its affiliate revenue while illegally tying AI Overviews inclusion to search indexing, and again in January, seeking damages off the federal court’s finding that Google illegally monopolized ad tech and thereby depressed the prices Penske could charge for ads. Under Google’s policy at the time, publishers could control some specific use of their content but couldn’t opt out while preserving their visibility in Google’s search.

Google rejected both those allegations, including by arguing that publishers can block Google from indexing their sites and that advertisers and publishers have alternatives to its ad products but chose Google because it’s more affordable.

In June, U.K. regulators ordered Google to let publishers opt out of its AI search features without hurting their ranking in regular search results. The European Commission separately opened an antitrust investigation in December 2025 into whether Google imposes unfair terms on publishers by using their content for its AI features without proper compensation or a real option to refuse.

In response to the pressure from the U.K. and Europe, in August Google launched the opt-out option for publishers, which allows them to refuse the use of their content in AI Overviews, AI Mode or Google Discover without losing visibility in search.