Google’s ongoing commitment to supporting the information ecosystem

Today’s rapid AI progress is unlocking incredible creativity and reshaping how people find information online, but it also raises important questions for creators, publishers, and organizations.

A thriving content ecosystem is essential to Google's mission. That's why, alongside investing in AI-powered Search experiences to support users, we're deepening our long-standing commitment to building products, tools, and partnerships that strengthen the publishers and creators who are the backbone of the web.

Our approach centers on the following key commitments:

AI should be a springboard to the wider web, making it easier for people to sort through information and build connections with the creators, publishers, and websites they most value. To support a healthy ecosystem, we are enabling information discovery and audience engagement from multiple angles.

For example, in products like Search, we’re continuing to show prominent links -- including in our generative AI experiences -- driving billions of clicks to websites every day. We’re investing in new ways to make links more useful in these experiences and we’re surfacing more first-hand perspectives, including from independent creators and online forums, using AI to help users understand their relevance. And we are giving people more control over the sites and news outlets they see in Search, helping them follow the work of publishers and creators, and highlighting content from their subscriptions.

We are also exploring new types of partnership and value-exchange models that can further improve our products and deepen our relationships across the ecosystem:

• News Partnerships: We have expanded our News AI pilot program, a commercial partnership program where we pay for enhanced content rights and specialized delivery methods, work with publishers to enable experimental AI features, and explore how AI can drive more engaged audiences. The program includes more than 200 publications globally, and we expect to expand further this year and next. This builds on existing programs like Extended News Previews (ENP) where we pay more than 5,500 European publications for the display of relevant press content in Search, including in Search generative AI features, and Google News Showcase where we pay more than 2,800 partners in 33 countries globally.
• Broader Collaborations: Beyond news, we are piloting a new way to partner with websites whose content meaningfully contributes to the freshness and factuality of generative AI responses through the process of grounding.
• Acquisitions of Specialized Content: We have entered into deals in which we are paying for access to and delivery of diverse types of specialized, non-public content including creative and educational content to help make further improvements to a variety of products and services.

Building upon our history of providing web publishers with a range of controls to manage how their content appears in Search, we recently introduced additional controls that offer website owners greater choice and flexibility over how their content appears in and helps ground our Search generative AI experiences. We’re also rolling out new insights for website owners in Search Console to provide metrics on how their pages appear in generative AI Search features and we’ll introduce additional metrics over time.

These new controls complement our Google-Extended control, which lets publishers control content use for training future Gemini models and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex API. These generative AI-specific controls are not used as ranking signals in the non-generative AI parts of Search.

We are also working with international bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force to modernize web standards to better address the wide range of AI applications and publisher preferences. Effective rights management requires scalable, interoperable global standards. We believe participatory, cross-industry collaboration is more effective than top-down, fragmented regulations that risk harming the ecosystem.

Building on nearly two decades of experience developing safeguards across our products, we aim to protect intellectual property while preserving freedom for creative expression.

Our approach includes a range of efforts, from deploying advanced, modality-specific filters that help to prevent AI models from exactly replicating training data, to actively removing infringing material via notice-and-removal systems. Tools like YouTube’s Content ID allow rights holders to manage their intellectual property rights whether uploaded content is created by AI or not. These guardrails exist alongside provenance tools and technology, like SynthID and C2PA, that help users understand how content was created and whether it was edited.

We see the next chapter of the internet as an expansionary opportunity for human creativity, and we are deeply committed to supporting the information ecosystem through that transition. By helping users discover and engage with the web, experimenting with novel contribution models, providing robust controls, and investing in safeguards we will evolve our technologies responsibly alongside the creative community and our users.