---
title: "Google Pays Sites in AI Pilot 0.1% of Their Ad Revenue"
description: "About 100 publishers are in the test, and many say the accounting is so confusing they cannot plan around it."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-09-30T16:03:48Z
modified: 2026-09-30T22:41:06Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/google-pays-sites-in-ai-pilot-0-1-of-their-ad-revenue-df2c77
language: en
tags: ["google", "ai", "regulation", "copyright", "search", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Google Pays Sites in AI Pilot 0.1% of Their Ad Revenue

*About 100 publishers are in the test, and many say the accounting is so confusing they cannot plan around it.*

By rews desk · September 30, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/google-pays-sites-in-ai-pilot-0-1-of-their-ad-revenue-df2c77

## In brief

- Google’s pilot pays websites about one-tenth of 1% of ad revenue when their content feeds AI answers
- About 100 publishers are in the program; some monthly payments total under $1,000
- Publishers say niche topics like anime and gaming earn more, but the accounting is impossible to plan around
- The New York Times and Penske Media have sued Google over AI use of their content
- The UK ordered an AI opt-out for publishers and the European Commission has opened an antitrust probe

Google’s test of paying websites when their work feeds its AI-generated answers is returning roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of what participating sites earn from advertising, reports by The Information and [Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/09/google-is-paying-100-websites-for-contributions-to-ai-overviews-but-the-amounts-are-tiny/) found this week.

About 100 publishers are in the program, and for several small and mid-sized sites the monthly payments come to less than 0.1 percent of advertising revenue, with some totaling under $1,000, [The Next Web reported](https://thenextweb.com/news/google-ai-contribution-pilot-publishers-payments), citing The Information.

Publishers in the test told Ars Technica that niche subjects with devoted audiences — anime and gaming among them — earn more than widely covered topics. But they said tracking the payments from month to month in the search console is often confusing, and that Google never makes clear what counts as a meaningful contribution to an AI answer. That makes next month’s earnings impossible to predict, let alone plan for.

The stakes run both ways. Google has long said its goal is to organize the world’s information, which works only if there is information online to organize. AI models are trained on data from across the web, but search answers often need live content behind them; if websites stop publishing or start blocking Google’s crawlers, the quality of its AI search declines. The pilot, Ars Technica wrote, is a step toward a new relationship between the company and the publishers it depends on, though the tiny payments and murky accounting could make it hard to expand. In the meantime, the outlet added, ill will is growing.

Some publishers have moved from complaint to court. The New York Times has a copyright infringement suit pending against Google and other AI firms, alleging they illegally used its content to train AI models. Penske Media, which owns Variety and Rolling Stone, has sued Google over lost traffic, arguing that tying AI scraping to standard web indexing is unfair. There is no dedicated opt-out: a site that appears in Google’s organic results is also part of its AI search.

Regulators are circling. Earlier this year the British government ordered Google to offer publishers an AI opt-out that carries no penalty in organic search results. The European Commission is running an antitrust probe into whether Google fairly compensates publishers for the content in its AI answers; given the company’s record in the E.U., Ars Technica wrote, a favorable outcome for Google looks unlikely. Both lawsuits and the commission’s probe are continuing.