Microsoft’s new content marketplace will pay publishers when AI uses their work. Here’s how it works and why it matters

Microsoft is officially launching the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), a new system that allows publishers to license their content directly to AI products like Copilot.

Instead of AI systems scraping articles from the open web and summarising them without attribution or payment, PCM introduces a formal marketplace. Publishers opt in, define terms and get compensated when their content is used to generate AI answers.

Stripped of the language, the idea is simple: If AI is going to answer questions using your work, it should pay you.

Multiple independent studies now show that more than half of all searches end without a click. Users get what they need from Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot or tools like Perplexity and never visit the original site. SparkToro estimates that zero-click searches are now well over 60% of total queries.

At the same time, automated traffic is exploding. Cloudflare reported that in several recent periods, bots accounted for more internet traffic than humans, largely driven by AI crawlers and scrapers.

For publishers, the result is familiar: Traffic is down, ad revenue is under pressure and your content is being summarised elsewhere without compensation.

PCM is Microsoft’s attempt to replace the old link economy with something closer to a licensing economy.

This is the part that’s sadly vague. All we know is that you’d need to and make specific content or archives available under defined terms to AI systems, like Copilot, and then you earn revenue based on the AI’s usage of it, not clicks.

How much you’ll earn, we don’t know yet. But it’s being tested by the likes of Business Insider, Vox Media and the Associated Press right now. However, smaller publishers will be onboarded, too.

Perplexity has already launched its own Publisher Program, offering revenue share when partner content is used to generate AI answers, with reported splits as high as 80/20 in favour of publishers.

Cloudflare, meanwhile, has gone in the opposite direction: giving publishers the ability to block AI bots entirely, unless payment or permission is granted.

Important for SA publishers: Right now, though, these marketplaces are heavily US-centric. That creates a real risk for publishers outside those ecosystems.

If US and European content is licensed, structured, and paid for (while African content is either scraped without compensation or excluded entirely), global AI systems will increasingly reflect foreign context by default.

South African publishers and builders don’t need to panic. But they do need to prepare. Because in a world where machines increasingly decide what information gets surfaced, being readable isn’t enough anymore — you need to be buyable.