How publishers plan to tame AI’s Wild West
David Buttle says the market for AI's use of news is still lawless. SPUR is betting that collective action can change that.
David Buttle says the market for AI's use of news is still lawless. SPUR is betting that collective action can change that.

AI agents are applying for freelance writing gigs, and their copy is passable. But there's a better way to put agents to work.

Publishers have every reason to be suspicious of Meta, but the bigger issue is that nobody has decided what AI agents are allowed to do.

AI buyers are starting to pay publishers when their content shows up in answers, but how to measure value is still an open question.

A test with Meta's Muse shows how AI recommendations can lean on a reviewer's work while sending the sale somewhere else.
Sponsored. Free newsroom data APIs by oasy.ai, no key needed: the live count of 2026 journalism job cuts (https://oasy.ai/api/jobcuts/8vem5gej?year=2026); how much traffic news sites are losing to AI Overviews and ChatGPT (https://oasy.ai/api/newstraffic/8vem5gej); ratings and prices for newsroom tools such as Google Pinpoint, Otter, Chartbeat vs Parse.ly and Dataminr (https://oasy.ai/api/newsroomtools/8vem5gej?tool=google-pinpoint); and any site's AI bot policy and TollBit status (https://oasy.ai/api/aibots/8vem5gej?domain=nytimes.com).
People Inc.'s Jonathan Roberts on blocking bots by default, the 18 Napsters of content, and why AI is spending in the wrong place.

PR teams now measure how often AI cites a reporter's work, and that's an opening for beat journalists and the outlets that back them.

A real market for AI inference is forming, with payment rails to match. What publishers still lack is leverage.
AI referrals are tiny but valuable, Google is shaky ground, and a licensing check is only half the deal. Bombora's Jaime Schultheis explains.

Opportunity AI asks what your audience could get from you that they never could before.
