AI content licensing
AI content licensing is the legal framework governing the conditions under which content may be used to train or feed an artificial intelligence model. It has been at the center of debates between publishers, authors, and model developers since 2023.
In practice
Some press publishers have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI or Google — the New York Times or Axel Springer — to authorize use of their archives in exchange for compensation. Others have chosen to opt out via robots.txt or AI-crawler-specific noindex directives. A company publishing SEO content must decide its stance: open its data to maximize visibility in generative responses, or protect it to preserve a commercial advantage.