A wish list with limits: What publishers want to see from Google’s AI licensing deals

Now Google is playing catch up, reportedly holding exploratory talks with around 20 publishers. What comes of those talks is still a moving target. But the outlines of what publishers want are already clear. The demands are straightforward, if a little aspirational: real money, real transparency and — perhaps most elusive — a sense of control in a market that has rarely offered it.

Digiday spoke with several publishers who broke it down into three core asks: meaningful revenue, clearer terms and a bit more control in a market that rarely gives it.

Revenue that reflects value

This one’s as much about principle as payout. 

Publishers have spent years feeding the machine — training the AI, populating the search results, keeping users engaged — while Google reaped the rewards. Any check now comes too late to feel fair, but it’s still a line in the sand. 

As one commercial exec at a publisher put it: “You have to assume the [upfront check] is the last time you’ll see that money.”

That’s why hybrid deals — flat fees with variable upside tied to usage — are top of mind. They’ve surfaced in other content licensing agreements, like OpenAI’s deals with the Associated Press and Axel Springer, where payouts reflect not just access but continued use. 

Without that, the core issue remains: AI Overviews and other products risk turning publishers into invisible suppliers — content creators cut off from the economics of their own work. 

“On day one, it’s fair to say that Google, OpenAI or whoever else it may be won’t be making tons of money [from these days] but eventually they will and publishers should share in that upside over time and not be stuck in some crappy deal where the platform gets all the benefit,” said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Raptive, which sells ads for independent sites.

Of course, even a generous revenue share only goes so far. If visibility, attribution and traffic keep slipping, the money won’t matter. 

Control over how their content is used and surfaced

Beyond compensation, publishers want agency: where and how their content shows up, and under what terms. It’s arguably the most important, and least guaranteed, part of these deals. And as they shift from training data to real-time content ingestion, that demand is only growing louder. 

As one publisher, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the subject matter, explained: “The more we can understand how our data is being used by their AI algos, the better we can design going forward.” 

Until now, that transparency has been limited — frustratingly so. Publishers say they’re often treated as if they’re asking for something extraordinary when in reality, they’re just asking for basic visibility into how their own content is being used. 

When it comes to Google, publishers are wary that they’ll get the data they want. For more than a year, publishers have been piecing together how AI Overviews, the AI summaries in Google search, are impacting their referrals and visibility. Google doesn’t break out that data in any of its analytics platforms.

“This must change. We need access to data to understand how these changes are affecting our business,” said Jacob Salamon, vp of business development at Trusted Media Brands. It’s a demand he and other TMB teams he spoke with have stressed, including TMB’s AI steering committee. 

Needless to say, this part of the deal will be among the most closely watched. According to execs interviewed for this piece, publishers are asking for two things: APIs that allow real-time updates, corrections, standardized opt-outs and attribution protocols. 

Lawsuits against AI companies (like the copyright infringement case The New York Times brought against OpenAI) could also reshape how these deals are structured going forward. The same goes for regulation.

“The AI standards are evolving very, very rapidly,” the commercial exec said. “What may seem like a good deal today may not be a good deal in the future. There’s a number of lawsuits that are out there that — pending their outcomes — could meaningfully change the way in which these types of deals get constructed.”

Partnership terms that restore power and predictability

Beyond money and content controls, publishers are looking for something harder to quantify: stability. For years, their relationships with tech platforms have been marked by volatility — opaque traffic patterns, unpredictable monetization and shifting rules. With AI, that instability could deepen. That’s why some publishers have told Digiday they want to see more structured, renewable partnerships — ones that move beyond transactional licensing into longer-term alignment. 

In fact, Salamon said TMB’s “dream alliance” would be one built on radical transparency, shared value and co-development. That means not just getting paid, but being involved: having a say in how AI products are built, gaining real-time access to data and getting tools to manage how content flows through those systems. It’s another key part of negotiations with AI licensing deals, publishing execs told Digiday.

Other publishers want clearer legal protections, defined deal durations and visibility into what happens to their content once it’s ingested. Is it used for training, for inference, or both? What rights do they retain at the end of the agreement? 

In short, they want predictability in an unpredictable market. Not just a payout today but terms that can evolve alongside the technology so they’re not caught flat-footed when the next shift comes. If they can’t get that then publishers worry they’re agreeing to partnerships in name only, with all the power still sitting on the other side of the table. It doesn’t help that those same partners are also reshaping the search ecosystem in ways that are shrinking the traffic our altogether.

“You’re going to see the continuous erosion of human beings going to web pages to read articles,” said Matt Prohaska, CEO and principal of Prohaska Consulting. These deals are “going to be the next step in seeing which publishers are going to make it, and which aren’t,” Prohaska said.