"Publishers have been waiting for another round of licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies. The first few agreements were small but encouraging. They suggested the industry might finally get paid for the journalism that underpins so much of the output of AI large language models. That optimism won't survive 2026. As long as Google's search crawler and its AI-training crawler are functioning as a single system, the market for licensing journalism into AI models is effectively stalled."
"Google has positioned access for model training as a condition, formal or informal, of maintaining your visibility in Search. The practical message to publishers is clear: If you want traffic, your content must be available for AI ingestion. Every other AI company sees the same incentive structure. Why pay for something your largest competitor gets for free? This is the reality shaping 2026."
Publishers expected further licensing deals after early, modest agreements suggested payment for journalism used by AI models. Google's search indexing and AI-training access now operate as a single, interdependent system, making model training access effectively a condition for maintaining search visibility. The previous technical distinction enabled by robots.txt has eroded, forcing publishers into a binary choice between full public visibility or exclusion from search and AI ingestion. Competing AI firms face little incentive to pay when Google obtains the same data without charge. As a result, the market for licensing journalism into AI models is stalled and data valuation collapses by 2026.
Read at Nieman Lab
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