AI licensing deals for news publishers: what the public record actually discloses
You can read every page that ranks for this question and not find a single agreement's value confirmed by a party to it or disclosed in a filing. We opened six of the nine ranking pages on 18 September 2026; the other three could not be fetched and are not quoted. What the six share is not disagreement. It is absence.
The most-linked timeline carries sixteen dated entries and no money on any of them. The one figure a regulator required names no counterparty. The tracker ranking second counts a different industry. None of that is a scandal: most of what is missing was never the trackers' to publish. But anyone costing out a license should know which parts are on the record.
Which AI licensing deals have a published value?
Only a minority of the agreements these trackers list carry a published value, and the timeline ranking first carries none. Only one page defines the unit it counts: an AI content licensing deal, LLM Pulse writes, is "a commercial agreement in which an AI company pays a publisher, news agency, forum, or media library for the right to use its content".
Digiday's timeline of the 2025 agreements, by Sara Guaglione and dated 1 January 2026, lists sixteen dated publisher deals between 15 January and 10 December 2025 and attaches a monetary amount to none of them, counted from its own headings on 18 September 2026. Its buyers include OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Mistral and Perplexity; its sellers range from Axios to The New York Times. We swept its rendered text the same day for dollar signs, "million", "billion", "undisclosed" and "revenue share". The one financial term inside it is a structure, not a sum: the March entry has News/Media Alliance members licensing content to Prorata "with a 50% revenue share model". On compensation, the December entry says only that "Google will compensate participating publishers". Nowhere does the timeline tell its reader that the amounts are absent.
One page does tell its readers. LLM Pulse's map, published 9 July 2026 and last updated 7 September 2026, states that "Most deal values are never disclosed, so any total understates the real spend", and warns beside its own table: "Do not read a blank or 'undisclosed' as 'small'; several of the largest deals were never given a public figure."
Its amounts are press reporting rather than disclosures. Read on 18 September 2026, LLM Pulse puts OpenAI's News Corp agreement at 250 million US dollars over five years, Reddit at about 70 million a year and the Financial Times at 5 to 10 million a year; Google's Reddit agreement at 60 million a year; Amazon's New York Times agreement at 20 to 25 million a year, with its Condé Nast and Hearst agreements undisclosed. Meta's News Corp deal is reported at up to 50 million a year over three years and Microsoft's Informa deal at an initial 10 million or more. Mistral's AFP archive access is undisclosed, as is almost everything else.
The one deal value that comes from a filing
Reddit is a forum rather than a news publisher, and its Form S-1 is still the only document behind these pages in which a deal figure appears because a regulator required it. Reddit put the aggregate contract value of its January 2024 data licensing arrangements at 203.0 million US dollars on two-to-three-year terms, and told investors to expect at least 66.4 million of it in 2024. The filing, whose financial statements were available to be issued on 22 February 2024, calls them "certain data licensing arrangements" and names no party to any of them. Its notes, read on SEC EDGAR on 18 September 2026, say what was delivered: "continuous access to our data API as well as quarterly transfers of Reddit data".
Plural and unnamed means no buyer, no split and no per-deal price appears anywhere in the filing. The per-buyer Reddit figures in circulation come from the press, and the aggregate covers only the arrangements entered that January — not the Reddit deal The Magazine Manager dates to May 2024.
Two trackers, one line, two different buyers
LLM Pulse and The Magazine Manager describe the same Reddit money differently, and neither is wrong on its face. LLM Pulse records two separate agreements: a Google one first, dated February 2024 at "60M/yr", and an OpenAI one at "~70M/yr". The Magazine Manager's list, published 27 July 2026, records one line instead, under OpenAI, dated May 2024 and reading "~$60-70M/yr".
LLM Pulse's 60 and 70 are the two ends of The Magazine Manager's 60-to-70 range — two buyers on one page, one buyer on the other. Both were read on 18 September 2026, and we cannot say which is right: the filing names no buyer, so it cannot settle either reading. They agree on News Corp: "~$50M/yr ($250M+ over 5 years)" and "250M over 5 years" are one contract, two ways.
The tracker ranking second counts a different market
Ithaka S+R's Generative AI Licensing Agreement Tracker, read on 18 September 2026, catalogues scholarly deals, not news, and a publisher arriving from a news-deals search gets no warning. Its first sentence is explicit — "several publishers have announced that they are licensing their scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs" — but the page carries no count, no last-updated date and no inclusion criteria beyond the fields it lists: "the publisher, the purchaser, the deal type and size, and the impact of and strategy behind the deal". The data lives in a Google Sheet, and the page says only that "We will update the tracker periodically".
Ithaka S+R is candid about it: "Thus far a standard set of terms or overall model from which to build these deals has yet to emerge." It is still a different market, and an academic training figure does not belong in a news count.
A "complete list" the page publishes as a picture
A page titled "A Complete List of Publishers and Their AI Licensing Deals" publishes that list as a JPEG with an empty alt attribute. The futureweek page, dated 4 September 2025, introduces it as "a list of some of the most notable partnerships between media companies and AI providers" — some, not all, a smaller promise than the title. What follows is the image file `Publisher-licensing-table-2.jpeg`; the page source confirms it in thirty seconds.
The table is not in the page's text at all: the values sit in the picture, so nothing in them can be quoted, copied or checked from the page, and the one thing a reader came for is the one hardest to verify. Which titles hold citations in a category is a separate measurement, and we published one in what ChatGPT cites in 2026.
Why so much of the money is missing
Deal values are missing from the public record mostly because the parties did not publish them, and in at least one programme the participants are contractually barred from doing so. The News/Media Alliance licensing program page, read on 18 September 2026, puts it to members directly: "Unless otherwise specified, all agreements made available to you and/or that you opt into as a participant in the NMA Licensing Program are confidential and may not be disclosed, distributed, or shared with any third party." It offers opt-in licenses for Bria and ProRata's answer engine, carries one rate — "Bria will compensate publishers 50% of all revenues for use of their content apportioned based on Bria's attribution technology" — and no participation count or amount.
So the limits of these trackers are mostly the limits of the market: Digiday's timeline is accurate trade reporting, and the missing amounts are the parties' non-disclosure, not its omission. LLM Pulse's refusal to print a total is honest, not evasive, for the reason it gives itself.
What a dollar figure leaves out
A published deal value does not say what was sold. The reported amounts cover at least three arrangements — training rights, display and grounding rights inside a product, and revenue shares — and LLM Pulse notes that many recent agreements bundle the first two. Terms run from a one-time payment to five years, and the consideration is not always cash: Digiday records OpenAI's January 2025 Axios agreement as including funding to open four local newsrooms.
A license is also not a citation. Whether an agreement produces visible attributions is a different measurement from whether it was signed — we separated those questions in AI Mode citations. We have argued elsewhere that a citation, not a crawl, is the unit worth paying for, since fetching a page and using it are not the same event.
What people actually ask us
What did Reddit disclose about its data licensing arrangements? Its Form S-1 states an aggregate contract value of 203.0 million US dollars for arrangements entered in January 2024, on two-to-three-year terms. No counterparty is named against it, so the filing alone cannot split it between buyers.
What is Google's AI partnerships pilot with news publishers? Digiday's 10 December 2025 entry describes a pilot giving Google expanded access to participating publishers' content and testing AI-powered article overviews on their Google News pages, with Der Spiegel, El País and The Guardian among those named. It says Google will compensate participants and gives no amount. Who the major buyers are by measured share is taken up in AI search market share.
Which publishers has OpenAI signed? LLM Pulse counted "roughly two dozen publisher and data deals" as of July 2026, among them the Associated Press, Axel Springer, the Financial Times and News Corp. The Magazine Manager adds an industry estimate — OpenAI spending "as much as $500 million on annual content licensing" — attributed only to "some estimates", with no named source.
Why did this become urgent now? Because the buying started and the prices did not become public with it: sixteen dated deals ran through 2025 with no amount on any of them. What it did to the traffic we wrote up in zero-click search and AI Overviews click-through rate.
Sources
- https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-between-publishers-and-ai-tech-companies-in-2025/ — Digiday, a timeline of the major publisher/AI agreements in 2025, by Sara Guaglione, dated 1 January 2026; checked 18 September 2026.
- https://llmpulse.ai/blog/ai-content-licensing-deals/ — LLM Pulse, "Every AI Content Licensing Deal, Mapped (2023-2026)", by Esteve Castells, published 9 July 2026, last updated 7 September 2026; checked 18 September 2026.
- https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024006294/reddits-1q423.htm — Reddit, Inc., Form S-1, SEC EDGAR; financial statements available to be issued 22 February 2024; checked 18 September 2026.
- https://magazinemanager.com/resources/blogs/publishers-moving-forward-with-ai-licensing-deals — The Magazine Manager, "Publishers Moving Forward With AI Licensing Deals", published 27 July 2026; checked 18 September 2026.
- https://sr.ithaka.org/our-work/generative-ai-licensing-agreement-tracker/ — Ithaka S+R, Generative AI Licensing Agreement Tracker; no date stated on the page; checked 18 September 2026.
- https://futureweek.com/a-complete-list-of-publishers-striking-ai-content-licensing-deals/ — Futureweek, "A Complete List of Publishers and Their AI Licensing Deals", by Katie Duffy, dated 4 September 2025; checked 18 September 2026.
- https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/news-media-alliance-ai-licensing-program/ — News/Media Alliance, AI licensing program; no date stated on the page; checked 18 September 2026.
- https://liamvi.com/blog/ai-and-search-engine-optimization — our own published position on the unit of value; checked 18 September 2026.
