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VIEW PASSES After years of watching AI products treat their journalism as a free buffet, publishers have formed a coalition to create a new standard that tracks how AI systems access their content at every step.
The Standards for Publisher Usage Rights initiative, dubbed SPUR, has gathered momentum since its March launch, signing its first U.S. founding member, the Associated Press, this week.
Unlike previous standards steered by ad bodies or Big Tech, SPUR is publisher‑run and fixated on one thing: turning AI’s use of their content from opaque scraping into a transparent, usage‑based licensing system they control.
**What is SPUR? **
It’s a publisher‑led coalition to rebuild the pipes between newsrooms and AI companies so that every use of their content is tracked, priced and paid for.
Its founding members include the BBC, Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky, The Times of London, European media group MediaHaus and, as of this week, AP. The news agency joins 30 publisher members and six affiliate members.
The AP is predominantly a licensing business, so its decision to join is significant: it brings deep, hard-won expertise in how news content is valued, licensed and enforced. Having a player whose core business is licensing on board underscores how seriously publishers are treating AI-era rights and signals that this coalition is being built around real commercial standards, not just principles.
In a press statement, MediaHaus CEO Gert Ysebaert called AP’s joining a “milestone” moment, because the use of journalistic content in AI applications is global and requires a “coordinated international response.”
What are the next steps?
A technical working group was set up to create the content telemetry standard, which was announced on June 12 and is now open for public comment until July 24.
Right now, the industry is trying to standardize how to track and report what happens when AI tools use publisher content. The proposal breaks this into five key “events”:
- Content retrieved: when the AI pulls your content from a source.
- Content grounded: when your content is used as the underlying evidence or reference for an AI answer.
- Content cited: when the AI explicitly credits or links back to your content.
- Content displayed: when parts of your content are actually shown in the AI’s response.
- Content engaged: when a user interacts with that response, for example by clicking a link, expanding an answer, or spending time reading it.
For each of these moments, there will be a standard format for sending data back to the publisher or partner: what happened, when it happened, and which piece of content was involved. The standard isn’t just defining the events; it’s also defining the data schema — exactly what information gets passed back and how, so everyone from platforms, publishers and vendors, can plug into the same system.
What is the goal of SPUR?
The telemetry push is essentially about resetting the economics and transparency of how intermediaries use publisher content in AI products.
**What about other stakeholders in the ecosystem? **
SPUR has already started road‑testing the telemetry standard beyond its own membership. It held a public comment event in London recently, with tech players like Microsoft and CDN vendors such as Fastly in the room to give feedback. On the commercial side, there is a cluster of VC‑backed licensing and infra startups — including TollBit, Redpine, and MonetizationOS — that, according to David Buttle, founder of DJB Strategies and a key architect behind SPUR, have been engaging with members and have told the coalition they plan to implement the five‑event standard in their products.
**Where does it sit compared to other standards efforts? **
SPUR sits alongside, but quite apart from, other efforts like the IAB Tech Lab’s Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) and Really Simple Licensing’s collective licensing framework, which has publishers including Arena Group, People Inc. and USA Today Co. supporting it.
SPUR is publisher‑run and hyper focused on editorial IP and journalism. It also focuses on the post-ingest phase, tracking how content is used, whereas CoMP was more focused on the pre-crawl ingest phase, AI monetization and bot management.
**But what about…? **
Here it comes.
**…the demand side? **
Right. The hardest part, as ever, is demand-side buy-in — in this case, the AI systems and LLMs. That problem hasn’t gone away. SPUR will still need to convince or pressure AI companies to emit its telemetry, so that usage of publisher content is logged in the standard format, and to shift as much activity as possible away from unlicensed scraping and grounding APIs into licensed channels that speak the standard.
Can a publisher‑run standard really move the AI giants?
SPUR’s approach is based around publishers acting together rather than cutting fragmented, one‑off AI licensing deals or just waiting for regulators to rescue them. The logic is that no single publisher — even a big brand — can force OpenAI, Google or any other AI model to accept publisher‑friendly terms, but dozens moving in lockstep on blocks, telemetry and licensing standards might.
As Scott Messer, principal of Messer Media, put it, the whole effort only works if both the standards work and the enforcement around them are treated as a shared project rather than a series of solo bets.
“The key here lies in both parts of this being a collective action,” he told Digiday in an email. “A divided set of publishers cannot battle the forces of LLMs, and certainly not if the strategy is simply prayer. Perhaps this is a lonely battle until the LLMs show up in earnest, and the best tactic for compelling the LLMs to the table is a steadily mounting pressure from all sides.”
With third-party scraping so widespread, does demand‑side buy‑in even matter?
Some SPUR members are already red‑teaming their sites — essentially stress‑testing them as if they were scrapers — to see which protections actually work, with plans to publish a public version of the findings, noted Buttle.
“There are a lot of businesses out there who are building a commercial model that’s based around infringing IP, so we should start to call that out for what it is,” he said.
If the telemetry standard is the carrot to lure AI companies onto licensed rails, this kind of collective and public naming of bad actors is the stick publishers hope will finally change the economics of using their work. **Publisher alliances generally have a checkered history. How is this different? **
Sceptics will say that publishers don’t have a great track record with collective action. They failed to stop their inventory being commoditized in programmatic, and even their own alliances ended up as just one of dozens of sales channels rather than a real point of leverage, noted Alessandro De Zanche, founder of ADZ Strategies and former News UK exec. The difference this time, he stressed, is that SPUR isn’t built around price; it’s built around permission: who is allowed to use publishers’ content in AI systems at all, and on what terms.
That doesn’t make the cynicism wrong, but it does shift where the center of gravity sits inside media companies, he argues. “The teams that drove the advertising channel into a wall are not the ones now dealing with content, IP and LLMs,” said De Zanche. ”The former are often ad tech people employed by media companies. The latter are lawyers, editors and chief executives, closer to the content and to the nature of a media company. Not all of them understand licensing, though many are learning it in public. But they know that their companies are in the business of media, not of the ad slot.”
With AI they are not selling volume, which LLM models already have. They are selling accuracy, provenance, reliability, he stressed. “The stakes are completely different.”
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