Microsoft thinks it has a win-win-win answer to the problem of AI chatbots delivering unreliable information: let them pay publishers for access to information that users can trust. 

Its Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM) has the triple aim of improving the quality of material provided to AI systems, providing revenue to those who provide the information, and ensuring that users of the AI services receive better responses.

“The result is a direct value exchange: publishers will be paid on delivered value, and AI builders gain scalable access to licensed premium content that improves their products,” the company said in a blog post about its plans.

If it works out then enterprises planning to use AI to help with their purchasing decisions, say, or to deliver services to their customers could be more confident about their results.

However, Zeyuan Gu, CEO of AI analytics company Adzviser, said there will still be questions over the quality of content, saying that it’s not clear how the value will be determined. “In the traditional web, value was observable. A publisher could see views, clicks, session time, and get paid through real-time bidding based on real traffic,” he said. “In an AI-first world, that signal gets very blurry. If a user asks a question and an AI gives a great answer, it’s extremely hard to know which publisher’s content influenced that answer.”

One possible issue for companies is whether Microsoft uses the same crawler for its AI content that it uses for its search function. If it does, then information providers will find it difficult to block content from use by Microsoft AIs without becoming invisible to its search engine. There is no confirmation it uses the same crawler for both functions, although it is widely believed to be the case, according to a paper from Akamai. Search and AI rival Google uses separate bots to feed its search index and its Gemini AI, according to Akamai.

IDC Research VP Wayne Kurtzman said this was an issue that companies understood and something that they would be required to address. “There will be changes to improve available content, where personalization options will quickly improve dramatically. That includes the risk of blocking content, which increases the risk of creating false narratives: It’s something that all companies need to be aware of.”

He said that the arrival of AI is already changing the way publishers operate. “Journalism is slowly evolving away from the ad-driven model of past centuries to a quick revenue model of licensing content. Yet others also see journalism as evolving as more community centric. One of these models may create a segment of people who do not have access to the same level reporting or insights.”

Microsoft has been working on the design of PCM with several US publishers, it said, including The Associated Press, Business Insider, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, and USA Today.

“We started with a focused set of scenarios in enterprise and consumer versions of Microsoft Copilot by grounding specific responses with licensed content and running experiments to validate assumptions before scaling,” it said.

There have been other attempts to make AI access to online content contingent on payment. Last year, CloudFlare introduced a service that would compensate publishers for using their content and in 2024, a trade body formed to license content for AI models.

IDC’s Kurtzman said that ventures such as these and Microsoft’s PCM will be necessary. “Content providers need to be compensated for their work. To that extent, Microsoft is seeking to do just that.”

But Adzviser’s Gu thinks that there is still some way to go before AI can be assured about the quality of the content provided. “Without a reliable way to attribute usage and impact at scale, I’m not sure how a marketplace can fairly price content for both publishers and AI builders. I’m very supportive of the goal here. I’m just skeptical that the measurement layer is solved yet.”