Google's pay-for-content test pays almost nothing
Small sites in Google's AI payment pilot are earning less than one tenth of 1% of their ad revenue.
Google is running a pilot that pays publishers when its AI uses their content, and new details say the money is very small for most of them. Barry Schwartz reports that about 100 publishers are in it, and that they are being paid only 0.1% of their ad revenue.
Glenn Gabe shared more from the report. For several small to midsize blogs and websites in the programs, the payments come to less than one tenth of 1% of their advertising revenue, according to people familiar with the payouts. Smaller sites have earned less than $1,000 over several months.
Smaller sites have earned less than $1,000 over several months
The gap between sites is huge
Payments vary a lot. One publisher that joined a few months ago has earned about $50,000 to $60,000 so far, which the publisher said does not represent much of its business. Another that joined early on is earning more than $1 million a year, which is a bigger slice of its revenue.
Google started testing the program less than a year ago, according to a person close to Google. It covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and the Gemini chatbot, so it touches the AI answers that already sit above normal search results.
The small size of the payouts has put some bigger publishers off joining. Three people familiar with the matter said those holdouts hope to pressure Google and others to pay more for content used by AI.
Why a small business owner should care
Not much, yet. This is an invite-only test with roughly 100 participants, so there is nothing for a normal small business site to sign up for. Nobody has said whether Google plans to open it up, and the sources do not say how Google decides what a page is worth.
The useful signal is what one participating publisher told The Information. An executive there said Google appears to be testing a new deal in which it uses publishers' content and decides for itself what that content is worth. Other publishers see the program as a way to learn what content Google's AI values and change theirs to match.
If you write for your own site, treat AI payouts as something to watch, not something to plan around. Keep writing pages that answer a real question your customers ask, because that is the content Google's AI pulls from either way. Do nothing else for now.