Google is starting to pay publishers when Gemini uses their work to answer questions. The Information reported last week that one of them is on pace to make more than $1 million a year from it. Smaller sites are making in the thousands, depending on the type of content they’re writing about.
What’s factoring into the payouts isn’t simply the volume or breathe of content on the site, but the specifics of what’s being written about. If you want to know what a page of the internet is worth to an AI model in 2026, this is the closest thing we have to a price list.
How it works
Google calls it the AI contribution pilot, and Digiday first reported it in mid-September. Publishers who get invited see a new panel in Search Console that tracks how much they've been paid, but not how the number was worked out, and participants say it can change from month to month without explanation. "It's quite a black box," one exec said.
What Google pays for is narrower than you might expect. A model like Gemini knows a lot from training, but that knowledge goes stale, so for many questions it checks its answer against what it finds in Google Search and revises it. This is called grounding. Not every page it looks at counts. The Information's example: if the model consulted 100 websites for an answer, perhaps only five would meaningfully improve it, and those five are the ones that get paid.
That's a different kind of data purchase from most of the ones we've covered here. Reddit's reported $60 million a year from Google and News Corp's reported $250 million over five years from OpenAI were flat fees, one price for the whole archive no matter how much any single post mattered. Grounding happens every time someone asks a question, and the pages the model leans on are the ones that earn. It looks like the start of a marketplace for inference data.
Why anime pays better than news
The $1 million earner joined early, and the money is a meaningful slice of its revenue. A publisher that joined a few months ago has made $50,000 to $60,000, which it said doesn't represent much of its business. For several small and mid-sized sites, payouts came to less than 0.1% of their ad revenue. A site doing $100,000 a year in ads would make less than $100 a year from Google's AI.
According to The Information, topics that are less widely covered online but draw strong interest, like anime and gaming, appear to earn more. That makes sense once you think about how grounding works. If twenty sites have written up the same iPhone launch, Gemini can lean on any of them, so no single one is worth much. If one fan site is the only place with a detailed answer about a specific anime arc, the model needs that page.
We keep seeing this across the data market, from Spirit Airlines' records to Recursion's lab data. Buyers pay for what they can't get anywhere else, and this pilot applies that logic to individual answers.
Who sets the price
The other ways AI companies pay for content mostly differ on who decides what it's worth. Flat deals are negotiated up front. Perplexity and ProRata publish a revenue split. TollBit and Cloudflare let publishers set their own rates for bot access. Google's pilot is the only one where the buyer decides what each contribution was worth and doesn't show the math. As one participating executive told The Information, Google appears to be testing a deal in which it "uses publishers' content and decides for itself what that content is worth."
Why pay at all?
The timing is a little funny. The day after The Information's story, Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the antitrust suits Penske Media and Chegg had brought over AI Overviews. They argued Google broke an unwritten deal: publishers let Google crawl their sites, and Google sends them traffic. "But an expectation is not an agreement," Mehta wrote. For now, Google has a federal judge on record saying it never promised anyone clicks.
The less generous explanation for the payments is that they're cheap insurance. The European Commission has an open antitrust investigation into how Google uses publisher content for AI, and UK regulators forced Google to offer an AI opt-out in June. A hundred small payments is a useful thing to point to in Brussels and London. David Buttle, founder of the publisher coalition Spur, told Digiday it looks like "a kind of hedge" against a future where Google has to pay for actual usage.
Publishers don't have much leverage either way. Turning down the payment doesn't take your pages out of AI answers, and opting out of AI features costs whatever traffic they still send. Several larger publishers have declined to join, hoping to pressure Google to pay more, which tells you how the people with the most leverage feel about the current terms.
My guess is that it's both: a hedge, and a real experiment in learning which content its models depend on. We’ll watch whether the program grows well past 100 publishers and whether Google ever shows publishers which pages earned and why. Until then, publishers know they're getting paid, just not what for.
Worth Reading
Eli provides an interesting take here, especially given my media work in Aerospace & Defense before writing Trove. As with any industry, relationships will matter more than performance of a single data set. Given how early we are, there’s certainly still time fore the winners of the market, the future RTX and Lockheed Martin’s, to solidify.
Partnerships & Deals
Compute, Energy & Infrastructure
Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion in convertible notes to finance its leases of TPU capacity, covering roughly one-third of the $125.2 billion Anthropic has committed under a five-year compute agreement, according to Anthropic's IPO filing.
Tencent reportedly signed a five-year, roughly $7 billion lease with Oracle for about 100,000 advanced AI chips in Southeast Asian data centers, with about 30% due upfront, giving Tencent access to hardware it cannot buy in China.
Samsung Electronics and five Samsung affiliates committed $1 billion to Helix Digital Infrastructure, the AI-infrastructure company KKR founded in June 2026 to build data centers, power, and fiber.
GMI Cloud raised $668 million, made up of $223 million in Series B equity led by ARCHIV with NVIDIA participating and a $445 million credit facility led by CTBC, to add GPU capacity in the U.S., Taiwan, and Asia-Pacific; the company says contracted annual recurring revenue exceeds $600 million.
Lambda closed a $1.008 billion senior secured loan at a 6.78% fixed rate, rated A(low) by Morningstar DBRS and Baa1 by Moody's, to buy GPUs for three deployments backed by two investment-grade customers.
Modal Labs is reportedly closing a $750 million round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation, more than triple its mark four months ago, as demand for inference capacity grows.
CScale emerged from stealth with a $145 million Series C co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Premji Invest, with NVIDIA and Intel Capital joining, to build optical interconnect for AI scale-up networks.
Data, Knowledge & Retrieval
Supabase raised $150 million led by GIC, with CapitalG also investing, and agreed to acquire Turso, adding SQLite-based databases built for AI agents; proceeds fund employee liquidity and new agent features.
Quartermaster raised $140 million, made up of a $100 million Series B led by Insight Partners and a $40 million debt facility from Stifel, to expand its SmartMast sensor network, which streams real-time maritime data from more than 650 vessels to insurers, shippers, and governments.
Halluminate raised a $30 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, bringing total funding to $38.5 million; it builds benchmarks and reinforcement-learning environments for financial work, and says four of the five leading closed-source U.S. labs are customers.
OneMedNet signed a seven-figure, multiyear agreement to supply de-identified imaging and clinical data to an AI precision-medicine company that will build a derivative dataset, with OneMedNet earning sublicensing revenue each time the dataset is licensed to an end user.
Models, Training & Developer Tools
SoftBank completed the third and final $10 billion tranche of its $30 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI, lifting its total to $64.6 billion and an ownership stake of about 13%.
Modulate raised a $25 million Series B led by Future Ventures, bringing total funding to $60 million, to expand its audio-native models and developer tools for detecting emotion, intent, and synthetic voices.
Enterprise Deployment & Distribution
Baseten joined the OpenAI B2B Marketplace as one of the first open-model inference providers, letting enterprise customers count spend on open models in Codex and the Responses API against their existing OpenAI commitments.
Reco raised $55 million led by AT&T Ventures, bringing total funding to $140 million, for software that shows enterprises which AI agents run in their systems, what permissions they hold, and what data they reach.
Industry Applications & Workflows
Instinct raised $1 billion in a Series C led by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation, four times its August mark, for a consumer agent that completes tasks by phone and computer.
Salesforce agreed to acquire Listen Labs, an AI customer-research platform with a network of more than 50 million potential participants, in a deal reported at about $2 billion, expected to close in its fiscal fourth quarter of 2027.
EliseAI raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, to extend its AI for housing and healthcare operations; the company reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue as of June.
Armadin, founded by Kevin Mandia, raised a $255.5 million Series B at a $2.5 billion-plus valuation, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, for always-on agent swarms that test enterprise security by chaining together vulnerabilities.
OpenAI and Synopsys formed a multi-year partnership to build GPT-Synopsys, a model that operates chip-design software, with joint go-to-market, revenue sharing, and OpenAI licensing Synopsys EDA tools for development.
Physical AI & Robotics
AMD agreed to acquire World Labs, the Fei-Fei Li startup building spatial world models for robotics and simulation, for $8.2 billion; Li becomes AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist, and the deal is expected to close before year-end.
General Intuition raised $220 million at a $6.2 billion valuation, led by Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management with 776, Point72, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst, nearly tripling its Series A mark, to build world models trained on action-labeled gameplay video for robotics and simulation customers.
SiMa.ai raised $150 million in a Series C at a $1.45 billion valuation, co-led by Fidelity and Amplify Partners, to scale its chips and software for robots, drones, and vehicles.
FieldAI, which builds navigation models for robots, is reportedly raising $700 million at about a $10 billion valuation, five times its August 2025 mark, with more than $135 million in customer contracts.