Forbes joins Google's paid News AI pilot as referral traffic falls 45%

Forbes has joined Google's paid News AI pilot, the program that gives Google expanded rights to publisher content to test new ways of giving readers context before they click. Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould confirmed the partnership is paid but declined to give terms. The features include article overviews on Google News, audio briefings, and citation data that shows Forbes how its content performs across Google's surfaces. Gould was blunt about the motive: Forbes' referral traffic is down about 45% year over year, and the deal is a way to learn without paying for the experimentation itself. "It's a chance for us to learn without having to expend the resources to do the experimentation ourselves... Testing comes with costs, especially with AI. There's a human cost... and there's also compute costs and token costs." Google launched the program last December with the Guardian and the Washington Post and has now expanded past 400 publications, including Reach, whose chief executive Piers North stressed the time-limited nature of the agreement as a way for both sides to assess mutual benefit. The counterweight in the piece is measurement: Gould said large language model platforms remain "a black box. We really don't have a ton of insight into how our content is performing there in a granular way."

The crux

Publishers are being paid for AI licensing as a hedge against collapsing referral traffic, but the revenue is a hedge, not a replacement, and the measurement to judge whether these deals actually compensate the loss does not yet exist.

Sell-side read

The AI licensing revenue is real but thin: independent analysis of comparable multi-year deals puts them under 1.25% of annual publisher revenue, so the value here is the citation and performance data, which is the leverage publishers should negotiate for as hard as the cheque.

Watch

whether the UK Competition and Markets Authority's push for publisher control over AI search usage forces Google to disclose how pilot payments are calculated.