AI is wreaking havoc on the digital publishing world, an industry that continues to rely on clicks, pageviews, and the resulting ad or affiliate revenue from human traffic.
AI crawlers have long had a free pass to harvest data from websites and publishers, displaying the info in a way that readers can skip actually clicking through to a site.
Think of Google's AI Overview initiative, which summarizes search results from a handful of sites, delivering a quick answer. The private AI firm Perplexity offers a similar experience via its AI assistant, AI-powered search engine, and its standalone Comet AI browser.
While AI overviews are often convenient for readers, they're gutting the money that publishers rely on to pay writers. No more traffic, no more content. That's just the way it works.
Some companies are now realizing that free data harvesting isn't a feasible long-term solution. After all, what data will AI harvest if humans stop creating content? In response, Perplexity has announced a new way to pay publishers for their content that's used by AI (via Bloomberg).
Comet Plus, as the new $5 monthly subscription plan is called, is designed to give "Perplexity users access to premium content from a group of trusted publishers or journalists," according to the official press release.
Publishers become more useful to their readers and their readers’ assistants, offering custom experiences for both human and user agent traffic while ensuring their important journalism and content contributes to a better internet for the users who demand it. In exchange, we’re distributing all of that revenue to participating publishers, minus a small portion for Perplexity’s compute costs.
Perplexity
Should publishers decide to enter a deal with Perplexity, Comet Plus subscribers will have direct access to their content, which Perplexity aims to keep to "the highest-quality content on the web."
As explained in the press release, Comet Plus will distribute revenue to its partners "based on three types of internet traffic: human visits, search citations, and agent actions."
That basically means that publishers will get a kickback anytime their content is accessed by Perplexity AI, whether via the Comet web browser, Comet search engine, or assistant.
Perplexity says that 80% of the money it pulls in from the $5 subscription fee will go to participating publishers, while the other 20% will go towards computing costs that keep the AI running.
According to the Bloomberg report, Perplexity has an initial $42.5 million pool to work with, which will presumably be refilled once the new Comet Plus subscription model gets rolling.
Perplexity already offers Pro ($20 per month) and Max ($200 per month) subscription plans; those who are already subscribing to either will have Comet Plus included. As stated by Perplexity, "We'll announce our initial roster of publishing partners when Comet becomes available to all users for free."
Perplexity is no stranger to legal scrutiny from publishers
Perplexity is no stranger to legal issues involving copyright and trademark infringements. The company received blowback from major publishers early last year, which seemingly resulted in the announcement of the Perplexity Publishers' Program in July 2024.
The program, designed to share ad revenue that a site would normally receive if AI weren't summarizing its content, had a list of initial partners including TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal in October 2024, the initiative didn't prevent Perplexity from being sued by Dow Jones and The New York Post for copyright infringement.
Perplexity says that 80% of the money it pulls in from the $5 subscription fee will go to participating publishers, while the other 20% will go towards computing costs that keep the AI running.
Perplexity isn't the only AI firm in legal trouble over copyright infringement issues. In May 2024, Microsoft and OpenAI were notably hit with a lawsuit filed by eight news publishers owned by the investment giant Alden Global Capital.
These publishers, at the time, joined The New York Times on the list of companies suing OpenAI for wrongful use of copyrighted work.
On the other side of the coin, Perplexity has recently attempted to take advantage of antitrust legal issues experienced by Google.
In an odd move, Perplexity offered Google $34.5 billion for its Chrome browser despite the product not being for sale and despite Perplexity's own valuation stating that the company is worth about $18 billion.
Cloudflare's 'pay per crawl' model is a similar idea
In July 2025, Cloudflare — one of the world's largest digital content delivery networks serving companies like Microsoft — unveiled a "pay per crawl" plan that forces AI crawlers to pay websites for the content they scrape.
Of course, websites must opt into the plan, but by doing so, they gain back some power over the AI firms making bank on the otherwise free data.
"If the Internet is going to survive the age of AI, we need to give publishers the control they deserve and build a new economic model that works for everyone – creators, consumers, tomorrow’s AI founders, and the future of the web itself."
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder
When enrolled, publishers can choose what content is accessible by AI crawlers, as well as receive information as to how the data is being used.
The "pay per crawl" plan is essentially a more nuanced approach than Cloudflare's 2024 release of tools to completely block AI crawlers, and it arrived with endorsements from more than 37 major publishers, including The Associated Press, Condé Nast, Pinterest, Ziff Davis, ProRata AI, and TIME.
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