Report from Hold the Front Page
In Brief – Google will pay UK publisher Reach for content used in its AI-powered search features under a new commercial partnership, making Reach the first major UK regional publisher to secure such an agreement. The deal grants Google enhanced content rights across Reach’s news portfolio in the UK and Ireland and forms part of Google’s news AI pilot program, which tests experimental AI features and content delivery methods. Reach’s chief executive, who has called for AI companies to provide fair compensation to content creators and described AI scraping as intellectual property theft, welcomed a top AI company recognizing the value of the publisher’s real-time reporting, local insight and extensive archives. Google’s director of news partnerships said the partnership would compensate Reach for enhanced content rights while testing AI features and exploring ways to engage audiences.
Context – The chatbot-search convergence is well underway, and it was always going to be an especially bumpy ride for search giant Google. Charges that the company was linking its traditional search engine indexing to its access to data for its own AI raised hackles from publishers everywhere. In June, the UK CMA ordered Google to make changes to its AI-powered search features to provide clearer attribution and direct links to publisher content in AI-generated search results and to offer publishers an effective and granular opt-out of Google AI uses without any ranking penalties in traditional search. Google has rolled out policy changes it says complies with the CMA rules and says they are being applied globally. EU regulators are engaged in their own antitrust review of Google search and AI and we expect the Commission to impose “interim measures” on Google relatively soon. Finally, while Google is testing a variety of programs to compensate publishers for making valuable content available to its AI, a recent study indicates that AI chatbot citations for leading ecommerce sites have declined, driven primarily by weaker visibility on ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.