Publishers Moving Forward With AI Licensing Deals

Of the AI companies proactively making deals with publishers to license their content, OpenAI has been the busiest and biggest spender, with some estimates saying it deals out as much as $500 million on annual content licensing, more than half of the industry-wide spend. The other big AI players have also developed patterns and earned reputations with their deals, as these lists of publisher / AI licensing deals help spell out. 

 

Cultural Resistance Hampers Use Of Ai In Newsrooms, New Global Survey Finds

Journalists are resisting the adoption of artificial intelligence and lack the skills or expertise to use it, creating barriers to AI’s wider adoption in the newsroom, according to a major new survey of newsrooms worldwide. More than half (52%) of those surveyed for the Future Newsrooms Study 2026 said “cultural resistance or skepticism” was the biggest barrier to wider AI adoption in the newsroom, with six in ten (61%) claiming a lack of internal technical skills or AI expertise was to blame.

 

What AI Engines Want From A Brand 

Artificial intelligence (AI) engines want different things from one brand compared with another. Google AI Overviews uses social platforms for local and availability signals. Between 11% and 14% of its transactional citations are near-me and store-hours prompts, according to data released by BrightEdge.

 

AI SEO: Writing That’s Specific May Get Cited More

User behavior and what other sites and people are saying about a site or product are increasingly important. The best way to influence that is with content that’s insightful and gives users what they’re looking for and a lot of it, as often as possible.