Roughly 100 websites now collect money from Google when their pages shape the company's AI-generated responses, but for several small and midsize sites the sums come to less than a tenth of 1% of their advertising revenue, according to The Information, which published the figures on Tuesday, September 29. Today's edition of It's New, the daily recap video from Search Engine Roundtable, opened with those numbers before turning to a sign-in requirement for reading every review on Google Maps and a test that presents sponsored products in the layout of Google's free product grid.

In Short

Google pays a small group of websites when its AI tools use their pages to write responses, and a new report says several smaller sites have received less than a thousand dollars over several months. In the same week, Google Maps started asking people to sign in before showing every review of a business, and Google began testing shopping ads laid out like the free product results they sit beside. Each change is about who gets paid, who gets to read what, and how easily an ad can be told apart from an unpaid result. The recap video described the 0.1% figure as an average for all participants, while the underlying report applied it only to several small and midsize sites, so the number describes the bottom of the range rather than the whole programme.

What The Information found

The scheme is called the AI contribution pilot. It pays participating sites when their content feeds responses in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the Gemini app, and Google started testing it less than a year ago, according to a person close to the company quoted by The Information. Reporters Alix Coutures and Catherine Perloff put the number of paid publishers at about 100.

The spread is wide. One publisher that joined early earns more than $1 million a year, which represents a meaningful slice of its revenue, according to people familiar with the programme cited by The Information. A later entrant has collected roughly $50,000 to $60,000 so far and told the publication that the sum is not much of its business. Several smaller sites have received less than $1,000 over several months. Sites covering niche subjects with committed readerships, anime and gaming among them, tend to earn more, and several larger publishers have declined to join in the hope that staying out will push Google towards a better offer, according to the same report.

What participants lack is an explanation. Payments move from month to month without a stated reason, and some recipients told The Information they have no idea how the amounts are calculated. On the recap, Barry Schwartz, founder of Search Engine Roundtable, said there is "no like formula that Google's sharing with those publishers" tying a payment to impressions, clicks or volume of content used. "I think Google needs to be a little more transparent of how they're paying," he said. His on-air illustration of $500 one month, a few thousand the next and $10 after that was hypothetical, not a reported figure.

How a payout is supposed to accrue

Google's help documentation for the pilot, reproduced by Search Engine Roundtable, draws a technical line that matters more than the headline percentage. Earnings accrue only when content contributes significantly during the generation phase, the point at which retrieved web pages shape what the model writes. Pages that merely confirm facts, or that are linked inside a response after it has been generated, do not qualify.

That distinction separates payment from visibility. A link inside an AI Overview can register as an impression in Search Console, yet on the documentation's own terms a link added after generation earns nothing. Descriptions of the programme as paying for citations, including the one Schwartz gave on air, sit awkwardly against that wording.

Everything else runs through Search Console settings, where participants accept programme terms, track accrued earnings and transfers, and can cancel at any time. Transfers may differ from estimated earnings because of tax deductions or local payment thresholds, a clause that weighs more on a site that has accrued less than $1,000 across several months.

Where the recap and the report diverge

On air, Schwartz described the roughly 100 participants as receiving "on average" a tenth of 1% of their ad revenue. The Information applied that figure more narrowly, to several small and midsize blogs and websites in the test, according to the passage Search Engine Roundtable quoted in its written story. The two readings produce very different programmes.

Schwartz, working live, reasoned that if the $1 million participant were at 0.1%, its advertising revenue would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars; the multiplication actually yields $1 billion. The Information, however, reported that the $1 million is a bigger share of that publisher's revenue, so the 0.1% ceiling cannot describe the top of the range. Search Engine Roundtable's written story also compresses the $1 million deal and the sub-$1,000 earnings into one sentence, as if a single publisher had experienced both; the excerpt it quotes attributes them to different publishers.

A price set by the buyer

The pilot was not new this week. Digiday first reported the pay-per-use scheme on September 14, describing a Search Console widget showing monthly earnings, no upfront fee and an undisclosed calculation method, with at least dozens of publishers approached. Unlike Google News Showcase, which spans more than 2,800 publications across 33 countries, or a separate news AI scheme covering more than 200 titles, the pilot includes non-news sites.

On December 10, 2025, Google began paying a select group of major publishers, including Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian and The Washington Post, for AI features on their Google News pages, without disclosing amounts. That was a negotiated arrangement with named titles; the contribution pilot is metered, and the meter belongs to Google. One executive at a participating publisher told The Information that Google appears to be testing a deal in which it uses publishers' content and decides for itself what that content is worth.

The revenue backdrop explains why even small sums draw attention. Alphabet's first quarter of 2026 showed Search revenue up 19% while the Google Network segment fell 4% to $6.97 billion, the part of the business that pays publishers through AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager. Click-through data points the same way. Ahrefs research published on February 4, 2026 found AI Overviews correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rate for top-ranking pages, up from 34.5% in April 2025.

Google disputes the framing. Nick Fox, its senior vice president for knowledge and information, wrote on July 17, 2026 that AI features in Search send billions of clicks to websites every week, a volume figure without a rate attached, and repeated the claim in an interview recorded in Brussels on September 25, when he also rejected the zero-click narrative. The hosts returned to the point on the recap, noting that Google has the click data and has not released it.

Here the measurement problem and the payment problem meet in the same tool. Search Console's generative AI performance report, rolled out to every site worldwide on August 31, shows impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates for AI surfaces. It shows no clicks and no queries. A publisher in the pilot can therefore read a payment figure and an impression count, both computed by Google, but not the click data that would allow either to be weighed against traffic lost. What is a contribution worth when only the buyer can read the meter?

Greg Finn of Cypress North, Schwartz's co-host, described the choice facing a participant: "do you want the thousand bucks to 50,000 bucks knowing what you're doing might be used to get you less clicks." Leaving AI surfaces altogether is now possible in principle. Google added a Search Console toggle on June 3, 2026 in response to the UK Competition and Markets Authority's first binding conduct requirement, with the main obligations taking effect on December 3, 2026 and page-level controls not required until March 3, 2027.

Reviews behind a login

Google Maps now requires a signed-in Google account to open the full list of reviews on a Google Business Profile, Search Engine Roundtable reported today, and the same gate applies to sorting reviews and to leaving one. The recap's own description summed it up in a line: "Google Maps is blocking reading all reviews unless you sign in."

A logged-out visitor who clicks to see more reviews, or tries to sort them as a route to the full list, now meets a prompt offering the best of Google Maps in exchange for a sign-in. It lists three benefits: reading and searching every review and photo, saved places that can be shared as lists, and instant travel times to frequent places such as home and work. Syed Amir flagged the change on X, and Michael B. Snow and Jean-Sébastien Girard posted about it on LinkedIn. Schwartz said on the recap that the switch happened "in the past couple days".

No statement from Google accompanied the change. The motive offered on air was inference. Schwartz suggested Google wants to stop AI engines, competitors, bots and third-party tools from scraping reviews, and he named OpenAI and Anthropic among AI companies he believes are taking them; no evidence to support that was presented on the recap. Finn called the move sensible. "Those reviews are super super valuable," he said, and disputed Schwartz's view that reviews belong to the businesses they describe: "They're not. How do you own those?" Schwartz expected people to find ways around the gate, noting that Google and scrapers have been "constantly fighting back and forth" over bot blocking for years.

The pattern is documented. Google deployed SearchGuard, its JavaScript challenge system, in January 2025 and sued SerpApi on December 19, 2025 for circumventing it, seeking statutory damages of $200 to $2,500 per act. A federal judge dismissed those claims on July 20, 2026, finding that SearchGuard protects advertising revenue rather than copyright. A hearing in the case was scheduled for September 29, 2026, and encoded redirect links now mean resolving every link in a five-page ranking takes 500 to 1,000 requests. Over the summer Google was also observed asking searchers to sign in to prove they are human instead of serving a CAPTCHA, and Schwartz recalled a test months ago that required a login to see more search results.

What the gate does not touch is Google's own use of the same material. Business Profile data, reviews included, has become the structured layer feeding Gemini, Search and Maps, and Ask Maps, the Gemini-built conversational layer of the app, expanded on August 6, 2026 to Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Japan and Mexico, plus more than 150 countries and territories in English. Google polices that corpus heavily, too: its 2025 Trust and Safety report recorded 292 million policy-violating reviews blocked or removed. The login changes only who outside Google can collect it at scale. Reputation software, local rank trackers, review aggregators and AI assistants reading Maps pages without an account are the obvious candidates to be affected, although none has described an impact publicly.

Nine tiles, one label

The third item was an advertising test. Brodie Clark spotted Google presenting its sponsored products block as a grid in the format normally used for free product listings, Search Engine Roundtable reported today. Instead of the long carousel that usually runs across the top of results or down the right-hand side, the paid products appear in the tiled layout searchers associate with unpaid listings, with a "Sponsored products" title at the top of the block. Clark argued that the title is not disclosed prominently enough, that the unit blends in and that it will confuse users, and he predicted a sharp rise in its click-through rate.

Finn walked through the example on the recap. The query was for bed sheets. In one version the sponsored grid sat among the organic results; in another it filled the right-hand rail as a block three columns wide and three rows deep. "By the time you're in row three column three you're so far away from the word sponsored products that you may not know," he said, before adding the commercial expectation: "we'll probably see clickthrough rates rise, more ad clicks." Finn also noted that the format once called product listing ads now goes by Shopping ads.

Schwartz's objection was direct. "I do not like Google making sponsor results look organic," he said, then conceded the point against himself: "And to be fair, the sponsor results label is very, very big." He recalled a time when Google shaded advertisements with a coloured background, before labels changed, backgrounds disappeared and paid and unpaid results were mixed. "Google's doing things they would never have done before making advertisers happy and people like me sad."

The sequence is well recorded. In September 2025 Google grouped text and Shopping ads under a single "Sponsored results" header rather than labelling each one. On April 2, 2026, one to four sponsored tiles appeared inside product grids in the main results, and on April 20 sponsored ads reached the free listing grid in the Shopping tab. By May they had moved into the related products grid, and sponsored listings inside AI Mode had become nearly indistinguishable from organic recommendations. By August 17, nearly 30% of ad-eligible AI Mode queries already carried ads, and on August 31 a shopping carousel ran inline within an AI Mode response for the first time. The hosts also recalled an AI Mode text ad test from about two weeks earlier, in which SpyFu's paid placement was the only one of three recommended tools whose name linked to its product; SE Ranking's mention pointed to a citation on Zapier.

Earlier steps inserted paid tiles into organic grids. This test runs the other way, dressing the paid unit as the organic grid. Europe adds a twist: over September 17 and 18, Google removed free product listings and popular product carousels across the European Economic Area, with trackers recording declines of roughly 90% to 100% in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands, and gave the space to comparison shopping services. In those markets the unpaid grid the test imitates has largely gone. Search Engine Roundtable did not say where Clark observed the test, and no Google comment accompanied the report.

Finn's conclusion on the recap was blunt: "if you want traffic, ads are still the way to go." Schwartz closed the episode in similar terms.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Taken together, the three items describe one position. Google now sets the price of publisher content its AI consumes, controls who may read the review content it hosts, and decides how visibly the product placements it sells are marked. In each case the relevant number sits inside Google's systems: the contribution formula, the click data behind the AI reports, the click-through rate of a grid under test.

For publishers, the pilot creates a revenue line that cannot be audited, reported in a tool that withholds clicks. Several larger publishers are betting that staying out strengthens their hand; the roughly 100 inside are learning what Google thinks their pages are worth.

For local businesses and the agencies that monitor them, reviews remain as available to Google's AI products as before but harder for independent tools to gather without an account.

For retail advertisers, a paid grid resembling free listings may lift click-through rates, as Clark and Finn expect, though no performance data has been published and many Google tests never ship. The disclosure question stands apart from performance. A label at the top of a nine-tile block is the only signal separating paid products from unpaid ones, and whether that satisfies rules requiring ads to be identifiable is for regulators, not Google, to decide.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google; about 100 publishers in its AI contribution pilot; The Information reporters Alix Coutures and Catherine Perloff; Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and Greg Finn of Cypress North, hosts of the It's New recap; Brodie Clark, who spotted the sponsored grid test; and Syed Amir, Michael B. Snow and Jean-Sébastien Girard, who flagged the Maps change.

What: The Information reported that Google pays about 100 publishers when their content contributes to AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, with payouts ranging from more than $1 million a year for one early participant to less than $1,000 over several months for smaller sites, and less than 0.1% of ad revenue for several small and midsize sites. Google Maps began requiring sign-in to read the full list of reviews, sort them or leave one, and Google is testing a sponsored products grid styled like its free product listings.

When: The Information published its figures on Tuesday, September 29, 2026. Search Engine Roundtable reported the Maps and sponsored grid changes today, September 30, 2026, and covered all three in that day's It's New recap. The pilot began less than a year ago, and Digiday first reported it on September 14, 2026.

Where: The pilot operates through Google Search Console for participating sites; the review gate applies to Google Business Profile listings on Google Maps; the sponsored grid test appears on Google Search results, in a market Search Engine Roundtable did not specify.

Why: Publishers face declining search referrals and Network revenue while Google withholds click data for AI surfaces, and the pilot sets payment through a formula only Google can see. The review gate restricts outside collection of data that Google's own AI products continue to use, and the grid test narrows the visual gap between paid and unpaid product results as Google expands advertising across search and AI Mode.