In December, Google launched its News AI pilot program, which licenses content from selected publishers and uses it to test new AI features in Google News. On Thursday, the company announced that the program had added new partnerships, bringing the pilot’s total number of publications to more than 400 worldwide.
When it launched, the program partnered with international publishers like The Guardian, El País, The Times of India and The Washington Post. More publications are now joining in, including CNN, The Financial Times, Axios and Forbes.
As part of its expansion, the program has also added local news publishers across the United States, including The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina; Oil City News in Casper, Wyoming; the Shaw Media newspaper chain, based in Illinois and Iowa; and the nonprofit newsroom The Texas Tribune.
“People’s news consumption habits are changing, and we want to make sure publishers of all sizes, including local newsrooms, can adapt to these changes,” Google spokesperson Brianna Puccini Duff said in a statement to Nieman Lab.
Google declined to comment on the exact terms of the agreements. However, Duff clarified that the News AI pilot does not operate on a “pay-for-value” model, meaning publishers are not compensated based on how much their content contributes to an AI-generated outcome. (The pay-for-value model is part of a parallel program that pays publishers for content featured in AI Previews, AI Mode and Gemini, according to a recent Digiday report.)
With the News AI pilot, publishers are instead paid to provide content that appears in experimental AI-powered features. This includes “article previews” – detailed, AI-generated article summaries of recent articles that can appear on a publisher’s Google News page. Here’s an example from the Washington Post, with a warning that the copy is AI-generated and “may contain errors.”
An AI-generated ‘story preview’ on the Washington Post’s Google News page
Another testing feature is the “Audio Briefing,” a customizable AI-generated podcast in the Google News app that rounds up daily headlines. Users can select the topics that interest them most, including “World”, “Games” or “Sports” news. The feature includes citations that link to articles mentioned in the briefing.
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