Three ways to pay publishers: Google, Cloudflare and Microsoft

Three big companies are testing ways to pay sites for the content their AI systems use. Each one works on a different logic.

Google's program pays when a site's content "significantly contributed" to an answer, in Gemini, in AI Overviews or in AI Mode. Publishers join by invitation and can pull out at any time from Search Console. Once they are in, they have no say over the terms. Google calls this a learning phase and an add-on to programs that already pay for content: the News AI pilot with more than 200 publications, a European partner program for more than 5,500 newsrooms, and News Showcase with more than 2,800 titles across 33 countries.

Billing for use

Cloudflare carries traffic for roughly 20 percent of the world's sites. It started by blocking AI bots by default, then built a billing mechanism on top. The "pay-per-crawl" model, a fee each time a bot enters, is still in closed beta. The company is now pushing "pay-per-use": payment for the moment content shows up in an AI answer and actually creates value. It also gave publishers an AI visibility dashboard, which tracks how often their material ends up in answers from ChatGPT or Claude.

The point is for a site to be discoverable without giving its content away for free, said Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's director of strategy.

The third route is a marketplace. On 3 February 2026 Microsoft announced Publisher Content Marketplace, where publishers can license premium content for Copilot answers. Two other models are also in play: revenue sharing (Perplexity, ProRata) and flat-fee licensing deals such as OpenAI's agreement with News Corp.

Who holds control

The main difference is not the rates, which nobody publishes anyway. It is the point of control. Under Google's model, a publisher only decides whether to join or leave, and the buyer sets the price. Under Cloudflare's model, the publisher sets the barrier, blocking or letting through, and negotiates from a position of limited access. The marketplace turns the relationship into a contract over a specific package of content.

In practice, negotiating power now comes from scarcity, not from law. Cloudflare calls it "credible scarcity": publishers that block access say licensing talks move faster. Small titles benefit too. Cloudflare points to local sites that reckon licensing revenue could beat their ad revenue.