What happened

When you search on Google, an AI-written answer often appears at the top of the results; that’s an AI Overview. There’s also an AI Mode tab on the results page, which skips the list of links and writes you a full answer instead. Those answers are written from what the AI has read on many different websites. So do the websites whose content gets used see any money? Google is trying one way of doing that on a small scale, in what has been reported as its AI contribution pilot.

The pilot is invitation-only, with Google choosing the sites that take part, and it covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. The principle is that when the AI writes an answer and a site’s content genuinely shapes what it writes, that site accrues earnings. In the dashboard participants see, Google puts it this way: “Accumulate earnings when your content contributes significantly to AI-generated responses.”

How much money is involved? At the end of September The Information, a subscription outlet that covers the tech industry, reported actual figures, and several tech publications followed up with the same numbers. According to that reporting, around 100 sites take part, mostly small and mid-sized content sites, and what they earn varies widely. These sites run ads on their own pages, so they already have advertising revenue. Yet for a good number of the small and mid-sized ones, what Google pays them comes to less than 0.1% of that revenue. Put another way, for every 1,000 dollars their ads bring in, the pilot pays them less than one.

Google confirmed to Digiday, a trade publication covering media and advertising, that this is “an early-stage pilot” and that it is “testing how best to reward high-quality content”. It did not confirm the reported amounts, and it hasn’t published the formula, the eligibility criteria or the full list of participants. According to the reports, some participants say the payments rise and fall from month to month and that they have no idea how they’re calculated. Whether any Taiwanese sites are in the pilot, Google hasn’t said, and we couldn’t find out.

Why it matters to you

Most of the sites in the pilot are content sites that publish articles for readers. You run a shop or a factory, which is a different business, but AI reads your website too: what you’ve written there about the services you offer and how you charge can be used to answer your customers’ questions. You might wonder whether you should be getting paid too. For the past couple of years publishers have kept taking AI companies to court and demanding payment, and the whole fight is about whether AI should pay for other people’s content. This reporting is the first real look at what that payment comes to when it does arrive.

Why so little? According to the reports, Google pays according to how much each site contributes to an answer. An AI answer is usually pieced together from several sites, so each one’s share is thin to begin with. Our read is that “your content was used by AI”, on its own, probably isn’t worth much, even to someone willing to pay.

With payouts this thin, what good does AI reading your site actually do your business? That depends on whether it brings you customers. Say you run a cram school in Hsinchu. A parent asks an AI, “Which cram schools in Hsinchu run small math classes for junior high students?” The AI recommends you, mentions that your classes are small and that you also teach on weekends, and even passes on the fees listed on your website. The parent reads it, picks up the phone and books a trial class for their child. That call could well mean a new student, which beats any payout. Turn it around, and the AI could read your site over and over, but if it never recommends you when parents ask, none of that “use” does anything for your business.

What to do about it

Act now, and put the work into getting AI to recommend you.

Who an AI recommends is settled by comparison with your competitors. Asked a question, like that parent’s question about small classes, it usually names only a handful of businesses, so every extra one it names is a slot someone else doesn’t get. Whether you make it into the handful the AI picks depends on how good your own site is, and also on what others in your trade have put on the web around the same question, and on whose information the AI finds more complete and credible.

Which businesses the AI picks right now, and where you rank, isn’t something you normally get to see. Looking over your own site, you can at most spot what’s unclear; what competitors have added lately, and whose account the AI has been leaning on, can’t be seen from your site at all. And every time a competitor updates its site or gets another write-up, the businesses the AI picks can change, so you can slip down without having changed a thing.

What we do is GEO, generative engine optimization, which in plain terms means getting AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews to understand you and be willing to recommend you when they answer customers. Our managed GEO service works to win you a place among the businesses the AI picks: our team fixes up the content on your site, gets what other sites say about you telling the same story, and regularly checks how each of the AI engines describes you and whether it recommends you. All you do is review the results.

Leave your details and we’ll be in touch to settle a time for a demo, where one of our consultants walks you through it live. They’ll start by showing you your site’s GEO audit score. That’s geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which checks whether AI can make sense of your site and scores it across 12 areas. Then we’ll put a question your customers often ask to ChatGPT, the way that parent asked about cram schools, and read through its answer with you: which competitors it picks, whether it picks you, and how it describes each of them.

Further reading