The Associated Press has joined SPUR as the coalition’s first U.S. founding member, adding one of the world’s largest news licensing organizations to a publisher-led effort to create standards for how AI companies track, value and compensate journalism.
Founded in March 2026, the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights is a publisher-led coalition aiming to move AI content use away from opaque scraping and toward a usage-based licensing model where publishers can see how their work is accessed and used. Its founding members include the BBC, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky, The Times of London and European group MediaHaus. The AP now joins 30 publisher members and six affiliates.
SPUR’s central argument is that publishers need more than the ability to block AI crawlers. They need visibility into what happens after AI systems access their content.
SPUR’s technical foundation is a content telemetry standard announced June 12 and open for public comment through July 24. The framework breaks AI content use into five measurable events: content retrieved, grounded, cited, displayed and engaged. It creates a common format for reporting those interactions back to publishers.
The standard also defines the underlying data schema, allowing publishers, platforms and vendors to integrate with the same system.
SPUR has begun testing the framework beyond its membership. Microsoft and CDN provider Fastly participated in a recent London public comment event, while licensing and infrastructure startups including TollBit, Redpine and MonetizationOS have said they plan to implement the standard.
The effort differs from earlier publisher initiatives because it focuses on measuring usage after content enters AI systems. The IAB Tech Lab‘s Content Monetization Protocols, by contrast, focused more heavily on pre-crawl access controls and bot management.
But adoption remains the biggest challenge. SPUR can define how AI usage should be measured, but it cannot force AI companies to provide that information. No single publisher has enough leverage to compel companies such as OpenAI or Google to adopt publisher-friendly standards.
SPUR’s strategy is collective action. If enough publishers adopt the same framework, they may create enough pressure for AI companies to participate. That collective-action logic echoes other recent moves, from Reuters and Time shifting to bot-blocking whitelists to broader efforts to build a global publisher alliance.
“The key here lies in both parts of this being a collective action,” Scott Messer of Messer Media told Digiday in an email. “A divided set of publishers cannot battle the forces of LLMs.”
The approach reflects a broader shift in the publisher-AI debate. Instead of focusing only on payment, SPUR members are trying to establish permission and transparency as the foundation for future licensing.
Publisher alliances, however, have a complicated history. During the rise of programmatic advertising, shared industry systems often created value for platforms while leaving publishers with limited control.
Alessandro De Zanche, a former News U.K. executive and founder of media strategy consultancy ADZ Strategies, argues SPUR differs because publishers are approaching AI through the lens of content ownership rather than advertising inventory.
“The teams that drove the advertising channel into a wall are not the ones now dealing with content, IP and LLMs,” De Zanche said.
With AI, he said, publishers are not selling volume. They are selling accuracy, provenance and reliability, and the stakes are “completely different.”
