Can Your Business Get Paid When AI Uses Your Content?

What launched on November 12, 2026?

A nonprofit called the Internet Licensing Collective (ILC), formerly the RSL Collective, launched a shared licensing system for AI use of web content. More than 3,000 media brands, content owners and publishing platforms are part of it, and Yahoo Scout, Yahoo's AI answers tool, is its first paying licensee. The idea borrows from music: instead of every AI company negotiating with every publisher, an AI company signs one blanket license and pays into a pool that is shared with the content owners whose work it uses.

Yahoo is the only licensee so far. ILC's co-founder Doug Leeds told Digiday the collective is in talks with some major AI companies but did not name them, and the fee Yahoo pays has not been disclosed.

How does collective AI licensing work?

AI companies license only the uses they need, which ILC lists as training, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), grounding, agentic applications and AI-generated overviews. Content owners join at no cost, decide which content is included, which AI companies may use it and for which purposes, and can keep or sign direct deals elsewhere because participation is non-exclusive.

Money is kept in separate pools for each AI company, so owners are paid only from products that actually use their content. ILC says its allocation rules weigh how a work contributes to an answer, how often AI relies on it and the value of the AI product, and that content that grounds an answer or is cited as a source counts for more. ILC has not published the exact formula. It projects its operating costs at or below 10% of revenue, with the rest going to rights holders.

How do you take part?

ILC is built on RSL (Really Simple Licensing), an open standard that lets a website state machine-readable licensing terms for AI companies, including from robots.txt. ILC says joining means publishing RSL declarations that define which content on your site is available under its license, without custom uploads or integrations. RSL works alongside opt-out tools such as crawler blocking rather than replacing them.

How much could a business earn?

Nobody can say yet. Mather Economics, a publishing analytics firm that says it did the study independently of ILC, estimates AI companies could pay content owners 15% to 35% of their revenue through collective licensing. That is a projection about the whole market, not a forecast for any one website. With one licensee and an undisclosed fee, individual payouts are unknown, and a small site with a modest content library should not expect meaningful revenue soon.

Recent weeks brought other signs that paying for content is spreading. People Inc. said it will join Microsoft's upcoming Publisher Content Marketplace, which plans to pay publishers per use of their content, and Adweek reported that Anthropic signed its first paid license with a digital news publisher, the Associated Press, covering election-night polling data.

Is licensing your content right for your business?

It depends on what your content is for. If your website exists mainly to win customers, such as a local practice or service company, its main job in AI search is to get your business described accurately and recommended. Licensing revenue is unlikely to change your economics, and restricting AI search access in pursuit of it could cost you visibility. Our guide to AI search access versus training permission explains that trade-off.

If your content is itself a product, such as a trade publication, a deep library of expert guides, original data or a specialist reference site, licensing may be worth a closer look. ILC says payments reflect the value content adds rather than catalog size, and Leeds gave Digiday the example of a specialized health AI product drawing on a handful of medical publishers.

What should you check before you join?

1. Confirm you own the rights. Guest posts, licensed photos, client case studies and syndicated material may not be yours to license.
2. Choose the uses you allow. Training, grounding and AI overviews are different decisions. Decide which you are comfortable with for each part of your site.
3. Check existing agreements. Make sure participation does not conflict with platform terms or any direct licensing deals.
4. Keep visibility separate. Licensing terms and crawler access are related but distinct. Do not block the AI search crawlers that help customers find you unless you mean to.
5. Track what is reported. ILC says members can see how their content is used, such as for RAG or training. Compare that with your own AI visibility testing.

Before sharing anything, it also helps to know which business information should never be exposed to AI tools at all. See what business data you can put into AI.

How DigitalOS can help

DigitalOS helps businesses decide how their content should work in AI search: what to make visible, what to restrict and how to measure the result. We can review your crawler settings, licensing options and AI visibility together so one decision does not undo another. If you want to understand how AI systems use and describe your business today, start with the DigitalOS AI diagnostic.