Google says it has 400+ publications in its News AI pilot, which tests features like overviews; participants include Financial Times, CNN, and The Texas Tribune

Local news publishers now have a new potential revenue stream as Google integrates their content into experimental AI features.

Google's News AI pilot, launched in December, has expanded to include over 400 publications globally. The program licenses content from these publishers to test new AI-powered features within Google News. Initially partnering with major international outlets, the pilot has now incorporated a significant number of U.S. local news publishers, such as The Post and Courier, Oil City News, Shaw Media, and The Texas Tribune. Participants include prominent names like CNN, The Financial Times, Axios, and Forbes. Google clarified that publishers are compensated for providing content for these experimental features, but the model is not a "pay-per-value" system based on AI output contribution. Key AI features being tested include AI-generated "story previews" or article summaries and an "audio briefing" feature that creates customizable, AI-generated podcasts from daily headlines.

The expansion of Google's News AI pilot to over 400 publications, including many local U.S. news outlets, signals a significant push by the tech giant to leverage licensed journalistic content for AI development. This move indicates a strategic effort to gather diverse data for training and refining AI features like article summaries and audio briefings. The inclusion of local news sources, often facing financial precarity, suggests Google's intent to broaden the scope of AI applications beyond major national and international publishers. It also points to a potential new avenue for revenue or content distribution for these smaller newsrooms, even if the compensation model is not directly tied to AI output value.

Google's approach of paying publishers for content used in experimental AI features, rather than a strict "pay-per-value" model, suggests a strategy focused on access and data acquisition for AI development. This pilot program represents a crucial step in understanding how AI can interact with and summarize news content, potentially shaping future information consumption on Google platforms. The participation of a wide range of publishers, from global giants to local dailies, indicates the broad impact these AI experiments could have on the news ecosystem, affecting how stories are discovered, consumed, and potentially even created across different scales of journalism.