IAB Launches AI Working Group to Save Publishers $2B in Ad Revenue
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Technology Laboratory has launched a new working group to tackle the significant challenges faced by publishers in the age of AI. The Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) for AI Working Group aims to address substantial ad revenue losses and uncontrolled content scraping, which threaten the sustainability of digital publishing.
Publishers are grappling with an estimated $2 billion in annual ad revenue losses due to AI systems providing answers directly, bypassing source websites. This issue, coupled with a 117% quarter-over-quarter surge in bot traffic, has led to an average of 5.05 million scrapes per site, according to TollBit's Q4 2024 report.
The working group, established on August 20, 2025, seeks to develop standard frameworks across infrastructures to enable publishers to control and monetize AI interactions with their content. It comprises notable companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, The New York Times, and Adobe.
The framework introduces three core mechanisms for publisher content monetization. These include content access controls, LLM-friendly discovery, and monetization options like Cost per Crawl (CPCr) pricing and LLM Ingest APIs. The LLM Ingest API offers query-based pricing, with publishers controlling content access through partner key authentication and supporting various pricing models.
AI-driven search summaries have been found to reduce publisher traffic by 20-60% on average, with niche sites experiencing losses up to 90%. The initiative also seeks to address brand reputation risks, as AI systems may generate responses that misalign with brand values or contain inaccurate information.
The IAB Technology Laboratory's Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) for AI Working Group is a crucial step towards ensuring the economic sustainability of digital publishing in the AI era. By establishing standard frameworks for monetizing AI-based content, the working group aims to help publishers recoup lost ad revenue and protect their content from uncontrolled scraping.
