Google's search earns a publisher's whole yearly payment every 140 seconds

Google pays about 100 digital publishers for the material it feeds into AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, The Information reported. The pilot is under a year old, the payments show up in Search Console, and several participants said they cannot work out how the figures are calculated or why they move from month to month. The sums are worth putting beside the business they come out of.

What 100 cheques look like next to $615 million a day

Alphabet took $224.5bn from Search and other in 2025. That is $615m a day and $7,119 a second:

• The best-paid publisher in the programme earns more than $1m a year, which Search turns over in 140 seconds
• One publisher got $50,000 to $60,000 across a few months
• Small sites got under $1,000 across several months, which is 0.14 seconds of Search revenue
• For several small and midsize sites the payment comes to less than 0.1% of their ad revenue
• Pay all 100 participants at the top rate and the bill is $100m, which Search covers in 3 hours 54 minutes

The recipients have been told neither the formula nor why it changes. That is a discretionary budget with a licensing label on it.

The same company pays $40m for one cartoon character

The same company pays a different rate elsewhere. Google has been courting Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Universal, and the Los Angeles Times put the going rate at around $40m for the right to generate outputs featuring a single copyrighted character, with a full library running into the billions. One character costs Google what 40,000 of those small-site payments would.

Apple has floated the same structure at a stated size: a usage-based deal for a rebuilt Siri, paying by how often the assistant draws on a publisher, against a reported nine-figure budget. Google runs the usage-based model too. It has not said what the budget is.

“Search saw more usage in Q4 than ever before, as AI continues to drive an expansionary moment.”

— Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Q4 2025 earnings call

Sundar Pichai, Alphabet CEO, on the fourth-quarter earnings call

Pew Research Center measured what publishers gave up in that expansion. Across roughly 70,000 searches from about 900 users, a result is clicked on 8% of searches carrying an AI answer, against 15% without, and links inside the answer itself get clicked about 1% of the time. The click rate falls by 46.7% when the AI answer appears. Against that, less than 0.1% of ad revenue.

Why nobody is bargaining together

Line the payments up against the legal calendar. Independent publishers complained to the European Commission in July 2025. Penske Media, which owns Rolling Stone, sued Google that September over lost traffic and revenue. The Commission opened an antitrust case in December 2025, asking whether Google imposes unfair terms by using publishers' work without adequate payment or a real way to opt out. The pilot started less than a year ago, which puts it after the complaint and around the investigation.

A German court has since ruled that AI Overviews are Google's own content rather than a summary of somebody else's. If other courts read it the same way, each citation becomes a licensing event, and Google would have to track what every source contributed to every answer and pay for it.

Until then Google negotiates with each publisher alone. Some larger ones are refusing to join to force the rate up, which costs Google nothing while other sources fill the gap, and those who stay accept whatever arrives in Search Console that month. This is our trade too. From your side of the screen it looks like this: someone types what a stablecoin is, reads the answer above the links, and never arrives.

Written for information. Nothing here is investment advice, and the payment figures come from reporting rather than from Google.