More than 3,000 media brands, content owners and publishing platforms launched the Internet Licensing Collective (ILC) in San Francisco on November 12, 2026. The nonprofit sells AI companies a single license that covers its members’ content. Its first paying customer is Yahoo Scout, Yahoo’s AI tool that answers users’ questions. Member publishers who open their content to Yahoo will be paid based on how Scout uses it, but the amount Yahoo pays has not been disclosed.
Membership is free and open to any publisher or creator who holds the rights to their online content, according to the collective. Its FAQ does not limit membership by country. Yahoo’s search engine, rebuilt on Scout two days before the launch, is available to users in Europe.
A nonprofit run by publishers
Under its former name, the RSL Collective, the ILC co-wrote Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a standard launched in 2025. RSL lets a website state its licensing terms for AI in a format machines can read. According to the collective’s press release, more than 1,500 publishers and tech companies backed RSL at launch, Yahoo among them. RSL now has more than 3,000 supporters.
The rename splits the two roles: RSL stays the technical standard, and the ILC is the body that negotiates licenses and distributes the money. Doug Leeds, who co-founded the collective, told Digiday that the new name is meant to show that any publisher can join. Digiday is a US trade publication covering media and advertising.
On November 14, the collective’s website listed 3,100 members but displayed only some of them. The logos shown included those of the Associated Press news agency, the British daily The Guardian, Wikipedia and the Belgian media group Mediahuis.
The roughly 490 titles on display also included daily newspapers from the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). Among them were Belgium’s Flemish dailies De Standaard and Nieuwsblad and Luxembourg’s Luxemburger Wort and L’essentiel. None of France’s major national dailies, such as Le Monde, Le Figaro or Les Échos, appeared on the list that day.
The ILC says it operates “at cost.” Its operating expenses are projected to stay at or below 10% of what AI companies pay, and the rest goes to rights holders. “The internet doesn’t need another black-box payment experiment,” Leeds said in the press release.
Yahoo Scout, the first paying customer
Scout launched as a test version, or beta, in the first quarter of 2026 and came out of beta on November 10. Yahoo made it the foundation of its rebuilt search engine, called Pivot Search. On any search, users can switch from the standard list of results to an answer written by Scout.
According to Yahoo’s press release, Pivot Search works in desktop and mobile browsers in the US, the UK, Europe and Switzerland. The Scout mobile app is available only in the US. Yahoo describes itself as the third-largest search engine in the US. The company says Scout has delivered more than 3 billion answers since its beta launch.
Yahoo says it built these products to make links and sources “more prominent than any other AI answer engine.” It also says it wants to send visitors back to publishers’ sites “in the spirit of traditional search.”
“AI answers are only as good as the sources behind them,” Eric Feng, who leads the Yahoo Research Group, said in the ILC’s press release.
Payments based on how content is used
The system rests on a blanket license: with one contract, an AI company pays for access to all the content that members have opened to it. The company then picks only the uses it needs. The press release gives five examples.
An AI model can train on the content. It can look things up in the content before answering, a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It can also ground its answers in the content, meaning it backs them up with sources. The other two uses cover AI agents (programs that carry out tasks on their own) and AI-generated overviews (summaries written by AI).
Leeds told Digiday that the fee is tied to the licensee’s revenue, so the payout to publishers can grow as that revenue grows. The ILC’s license page says the fee tracks the revenue of each AI product. Each customer’s money goes into a separate pool. A publisher is paid only by the AI products that actually use its content.
The split among publishers follows “allocation rules” developed with the collective’s steering committee of publishers. According to the FAQ, the rules weigh three factors: the role the content plays in the answer, how often it is used and the value of the AI product. Content counts for more when it shapes the answer, grounds it in facts or is cited as a source. The ILC says the goal is to pay independent and specialized publishers fairly.
Leeds gave Digiday an example. Content used to check a fact would earn less than content used in an answer that displays detailed election results and credits the Associated Press. The exact formula has not been published.
Free, non-exclusive membership
To join, a publisher creates a free account. It then adds an RSL declaration to its site that states which pages are available under the ILC license. The RSL website shows how: the publisher adds a “License” line to its robots.txt file, and that line points to a file describing the terms. Robots.txt is the file that gives instructions to crawlers, the programs that browse websites, as our article on AI crawlers and robots.txt explains.
Publishers then choose which AI companies get the license and for which uses, and they can change these choices at any time. For now, Yahoo is the only option. Membership is non-exclusive, so a publisher that has already signed a direct deal with an AI company keeps that deal.
The FAQ says payments are made “on a regular schedule” but gives no minimum amount or frequency. A dashboard breaks down, site by site, how the paying AI companies report using the content.
Projections and open questions
On launch day, Mather Economics, an economic analysis firm, published a study called The Price of Intelligence. It estimates that AI companies would be willing to pay between 15% and 35% of their revenue to keep access to licensed content. The study says this licensing market could surpass the 2025 revenue of US display advertising (visual online ads such as banners) within three years.
According to the ILC’s press release, Mather did the study independently: the collective neither commissioned nor funded it. Digiday reported that the estimate is based on the annual revenue of the two largest AI model developers, OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) and Anthropic (maker of Claude). The figures are projections from an economic model.
Several questions are still open. Leeds says the ILC is in talks with “some” of the major AI companies but has not named them.
Little is public about the Yahoo deal itself. The press release does not say whether the license covers the answers Scout shows users in Europe, or what Scout does with pages from nonmember publishers. The license page says only that the split takes geographic markets into account.
Digiday has previously reported that Google and Microsoft are testing other approaches that pay publishers when their content meaningfully contributes to an AI-generated answer.
What it means
Until now, licensing content for AI has mostly meant one-off deals between publishers and tech companies, Digiday notes. According to the collective, most publishers can’t negotiate individually with every AI company. The ILC offers another path: a shared license, payments tied to actual use and rules developed with publishers.
The collective gives publishers one more tool for controlling AI use of their content. On October 30, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic said they would honor a shared robots.txt rule against model training. RSL goes further, according to Digiday: a publisher can use it to set a price, for example per crawler visit or per generated answer.
Several publisher groups are also turning to courts or regulators. In France, five trade groups filed a complaint with the European Commission against Google’s AI Overviews on October 29, 2026. AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some search results.
On November 3, an Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union gave his opinion in a case from Hungary involving Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. Advocates General advise the Court, and their opinions do not bind it. In his view, Gemini may infringe press publishers’ rights in some cases. Under EU law, those rights let press publishers authorize or prohibit the reuse of their articles online.
The ILC is betting on private contracts. Matt Lindsay, president and chief economist of Mather Economics, called that route “faster than waiting for courts or regulators to sort it out.”
Only one customer has signed, and neither the price nor the payout formula is public. So far, there is no way to tell how much a site will earn per answer or per month.
Three signs will show whether the model catches on: a major AI company signing on as the second customer, the first payment statements reaching members, and French press groups joining.
Sources
- The Internet Licensing Collective (ILC) Launches with Yahoo Scout as First Commercial Partner, Internet Licensing Collective, November 12, 2026
- Frequently asked questions, Internet Licensing Collective, accessed November 14, 2026
- Collective licensing for the AI-first Internet, Internet Licensing Collective, accessed November 14, 2026
- ILC Collective License, Internet Licensing Collective, accessed November 14, 2026
- After Delivering More Than 3 Billion Answers, Yahoo Scout Exits Beta to Underpin All of Yahoo Search, Yahoo, November 10, 2026
- RSL: Really Simple Licensing, RSL, accessed November 14, 2026
- The Price of Intelligence, Mather Economics, November 12, 2026
- Yahoo becomes first licensee of ‘Spotify-like’ collective AI content licensing model, Digiday, November 12, 2026
Header image: MACCUS diagram, based on the Internet Licensing Collective’s press release and FAQ, and Digiday, November 2026
