The news: Google is looking to sign licensing deals with more publishers, per Bloomberg, to improve its products and address the threat of dwindling AI training resources.

• It’s launching a pilot project to partner with about 20 national news outlets, which could help ease tensions between Big Tech players and the publishers that are demanding compensation for their content.
• The project is “tailored to specific products,” per Bloomberg.

Fifty-seven percent of US adults support news and media publishers being compensated when their content is used to train AI, per News/Media Alliance.

Compensating creators: Until now, Google has mostly stood on the sidelines as rivals like Perplexity and OpenAI struck licensing deals with publishers. But the pool of public data available for model training is drying up, which could slow down future model improvement.

“Platforms’ access to unlimited web data is about to end. … They need to have licensing relationships in place, or there won’t be any blood to put in the veins of the AI monster,” Distributed Media Lab CEO David Gehring told Bloomberg.

Large language models (LLMs) are expected to exhaust the remaining amount of public training data between 2026 and 2032, per Epoch AI.

Crawling and indexing: Emerging tools like Cloudflare’s “pay-per-crawl” model suggest that crawling and scraping—the backbone of how companies like Google index the web—could change from a free-for-all to a pay-to-play model.

If crawling becomes more restricted or limited, search engines may not consistently index content, affecting visibility and pushing platforms to rethink how they structure, serve, and optimize content for discovery.

Why it matters for marketers: Exclusive licensing deals could lead to more paywalled or inaccessible publisher content, reducing ad inventory and brand visibility in both traditional search results and AI-generated summaries like AI Overviews.

Our take: Google’s increased effort to license more media content shows it’s gearing up for a future in which AI-generated summaries dominate search.

As this shift occurs, brands will need to focus on generative engine optimization (GEO) to get their content into AI summaries, such as by including concise takeaways that LLMs can surface. Preparing for a world where more premium content is behind paywalls could also include deeper publisher partnerships.