More than 400 publications worldwide now take part in Google's News AI pilot, the company said Thursday. The program pays publishers to license their content for experimental AI features inside Google News. The newest partners include Axios, CNN, the Financial Times and Forbes.
“Through this licensing program, we pay participating news publications for the delivery and use of enhanced content to develop new AI features,” Google said in a blog post.
Local U.S. publishers have joined as well. They include the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, the Texas Tribune, Oil City News in Wyoming and the newspaper chain Shaw Media. The pilot launched last December with partners including The Washington Post and The Washington Examiner.
The licensed articles feed what Google calls “story previews,” which are AI-generated summaries that appear on a publisher's Google News page. Nieman Lab reported on the feature. An example from The Washington Post carries a note saying the copy is AI-generated and “may include mistakes.”
A second test feature is an audio briefing, a custom AI podcast inside the Google News app. Users choose topics such as World, Gaming or Sports, and the briefing links to the articles it cites. That gives readers a way to trace the audio back to the original reporting.
Google declined to share the terms of the deals. A company spokesperson told Nieman Lab that the pilot does not pay publishers based on how much of their content appears in an AI answer. That payment model belongs to a separate program covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini.
“People's information consumption habits are changing, and we want to make sure publishers of all sizes, local newsrooms included, can navigate these shifts,” said Brianna Puccini Duff, a Google spokesperson, in comments to Nieman Lab.
CNN's agreement is its first partnership since Paramount Skydance completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Reuters reported. CNN said the deal fits its strategy to protect its intellectual property.
“Google's innovation with generative AI has changed how people discover information and content, and now those tools will help us explore new ways to discover and engage audiences,” said Sam Felix, a senior vice president at CNN, in comments to Reuters.
The deals come as publishers step up efforts to stop AI companies from using their content without permission, Reuters noted.
Google has also changed how links appear in its AI search results, The Verge reported. Inline links in AI Overviews and AI Mode will now show “higher up in responses more frequently,” Google said. The company is also testing links at the top of some answers and adding image thumbnails to links that appear at the end of responses.
For publishers, the changes touch on two questions at once: how their work gets paid for when it appears in AI-generated answers, and how much traffic those answers send back to their sites. Google's pilot addresses the first in a limited way, and its link changes speak to the second. Google has not said how many publishers will eventually join the program or whether the link changes will affect referral traffic to participating outlets.
Questo articolo è stato scritto con l'assistenza dell'IA.
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