Internet Licensing Collective signs Yahoo Scout to pay publishers for AI answers

Sites that make money from search traffic have watched AI answer products use their words without paying for them. The Internet Licensing Collective, a nonprofit that launched on 12 November, says that stops with its first paying licensee. Yahoo Scout, Yahoo's AI answer product, will pay publishers for the content it uses in those answers.

The ILC says over 3,100 media brands and content owners have joined. Its member list names Associated Press, Reddit, TIME, Wikipedia, The Guardian, The Boston Globe and Stack Overflow. Yahoo Scout is the only AI company signed so far. The ILC says it was built by content owners and runs as a nonprofit.

How the payment works

Publishers get paid based on how much their content is used in the AI product. The ILC sets how the money is split through what it calls Allocation Rules. The nonprofit says its operating cost will stay at or below 10 percent of the money it collects. The rest goes to the publishers.

Doug Leeds is a co-founder of the ILC. He said in the press release that the group was built by content owners. Eric Feng leads Yahoo's Research Group. He said in the same release that "AI answers are only as good as the sources behind them". The ILC did not say how much Yahoo Scout pays. Yahoo did not share how many answers draw on the pool's content each month.

The old model, applied to AI

The ILC calls itself a collective. One licence lets an AI company reach 3,100 publishers at once. The alternative is to sign a separate deal with each publisher. The ILC says this is the same model that music publishers use. Radio stations and streaming services pay one group, not each songwriter. The ILC also points at a Mather Economics report. The report estimates the AI content licensing market could reach $75 billion to $170 billion by 2030. It also says AI companies may pay 15 to 35 percent of their revenue for licensed content. The report is Mather's own forecast.

The ILC also says its rebrand is new. It was called the RSL Collective before 2026. The new name makes its remit plain: any publisher on the internet whose content might end up inside an AI answer.

A publisher that joins the ILC gets paid when an AI buyer uses its pages. The ILC's job is to find more AI buyers. A publisher that waits can still try to cut its own deal with each AI company. Some news outlets have already done this with OpenAI and Google. The ILC's pitch is that one deal reaches every AI company that signs the collective. The trade-off is that the publisher does not set its own rate.

Source

The Internet Licensing Collective press release. Search Engine Roundtable coverage by Barry Schwartz.