Where are Google’s AI licensing deals?

Artificial intelligence startups have been striking licensing and partnership deals with various publishers over the past year, gaining access to their content to help train their models and surface more accurate and timely content for their users. OpenAI now has agreements in place with multiple major publishers, for example, while startups such as Perplexity and ProRata.ai are touting models where publishers are compensated and credited when their content is used.

There’s been a notable exception from the AI-licensing wave, however. Other than its reported $60 million deal with Reddit, Google has so far refrained from compensating publishers directly for access to their content. Rather, its pitch to publishers around its AI products has been consistent with its approach to search over the past 20 years: Publishers should enable Google to access and crawl their content for free, and Google will send traffic their way in return.

Google has signaled to publishers behind closed doors that it is not interested in negotiating licenses for access to their content, Bloomberg reported last week. That’s putting publishers in a precarious but familiar position: They can either grant Google access to their content and hope it will send them traffic down the line, or block Google entirely and risk cutting off a valuable stream of traffic to their websites. Most publishers have opted to take the first path so far.

Google is in a very different position from most AI startups when it comes to leverage, of course, given that it’s proven its ability to send meaningful traffic to publishers’ sites. New search and AI entrants can’t make promises about traffic without first gaining significant traction with audiences, leaving them with little option but to offer guarantees to publishers willing to play ball.

But as far as their relationships with Google go, some publishers say they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. As Joe Ragazzo, publisher of Talking Points Memo told Bloomberg, “These are two bad options. You drop out and you die immediately, or you partner with them and you probably just die slowly, because eventually they’re not going to need you either.”

Based on the signals Google has been sending publishers so far, that’s unlikely to change any time soon. OpenAI and other AI startups may have had little choice but to open their checkbooks to establish relationships with publishers, but Google’s tentacles already run deep across the web. A Google licensing spree continues to seem unlikely, therefore, unless consumer behavior begins to shift quickly and significantly.