Google’s early attempt to pay websites for AI answers is struggling

In general, publishers in the test seem to agree that certain topics that are not as widely covered but have strong niche interest earn more, including anime and gaming. However, publishers also say that tracking the payments from month to month in the search console is often confusing. It’s not clear what counts as a meaningful contribution to an AI answer, so it’s impossible to plan for future earnings.

A shifting landscape

Google has noted over the years that its goal is to organize the world’s information, but that only works if there’s information online to organize. Frontier AI models are trained on data from around the web, letting them answer many questions within the knowledge cutoff. But in a search context, those answers often need the backing of live web content. If websites stop publishing or start blocking Google, AI search quality will decline.

The AI contribution pilot is a step toward forging a new kind of relationship between Google…