IAB Tech Lab Launches AI Working Group to Protect Publishers' Ad Revenue
The Interactive Advertising Bureau Technology Laboratory (IAB Tech Lab) has launched a new working group to tackle the economic threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to digital publishing. The 'Content Monetization Protocols for AI' (CoMP) group aims to address dramatic traffic reductions and uncompensated content scraping, which cost publishers $2 billion annually in ad revenue.
The CoMP working group, formed on August 20, 2025, comprises major industry players like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and leading publishers. They will focus on standardizing bot and agent access controls, content discovery mechanisms, and monetization options. One key initiative is the Cost per Crawl (CPCr) framework, which enables publishers to charge AI bots for accessing their content, potentially starting at $0.001 per HTTP request.
AI-driven search summaries have been reducing publisher traffic by 20-60% on average, with niche sites experiencing losses up to 90%. Simultaneously, bot traffic has surged 117% quarter-over-quarter, with sites scraped an average of 5.05 million times according to TollBit's Q4 2024 report. The LLM Ingest API, another key mechanism, provides query-based pricing, determined through pre-agreed rates or dynamic bidding systems.
The CoMP working group seeks to develop standard frameworks enabling publishers to control and enforce terms of use at scale. By implementing mechanisms like CPCr and LLM Ingest APIs, publishers can potentially recoup losses and ensure the economic sustainability of digital publishing in the face of AI-driven challenges.
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