Reach signs a Google AI deal and turns up the heat on OpenAI

Reach, the UK publisher of the Daily Express, Daily Star and OK! Magazine, has agreed a two-year deal giving Google paid, expanded rights to use its UK and Ireland news content in Google's news AI pilot, and its chief executive Piers North is holding it up as the template every other AI firm should sign. At the same time, Reach has sent OpenAI a cease-and-desist letter, escalating a fight North frames in blunt terms: the publisher has logged "well over 100 million" successful scrapes of its content in six months. "We can see how millions of times a month your bots are literally all over our content," North told Digiday. "You are the new monopolies, and therefore consumers will change because you are changing them." North says the company is in active discussions with Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, but OpenAI is "not playing ball", and the deal's value will be judged at renewal on whether the content actually drives engagement. His non-negotiable is consent plus a fair framework, not a ban on AI growth.

The crux

Reach is trying to convert the AI-licensing fight from litigation into a standardised deal framework, using the Google agreement as a benchmark to force holdouts such as OpenAI to recognise that publisher content is a paid input, not a free scrape target.

Sell-side read

The Google deal sets a pricing and structure precedent smaller publishers can point to, but the economics are unproven: licensing revenue is concentrated among large, written-about publishers, and it does not yet replace the referral traffic AI search is draining, so treat any AI deal as a value signal to negotiate against, not a revenue replacement.

Watch

whether OpenAI responds to the cease-and-desist and whether Reach discloses deal economics at the two-year renewal, which is the real test of whether "pay-per-value" pricing holds.