// publisher economics

Source: Search Engine Journal

Three infrastructure giants are running parallel experiments on how to compensate publishers for AI training and retrieval. Google's approach differs materially from Cloudflare and Microsoft's models, which fractures negotiating power across publishers and tilts outcomes toward whichever tech company's model becomes dominant. The outcome determines whether publishers extract direct value from AI systems or whether intermediaries capture the economic rent—a split that will shape digital media economics for the next five years.