TheChek News Flow

The Takeaway

Amazon has indicated to publishing industry executives that it is planning to launch a marketplace where publishers can sell their content to firms offering AI products, according to two people who spoke with Amazon about the project.

Those discussions come as publishers and AI companies are battling to set terms over how AI firms can access online content, either for training models or for answering queries from users. Publishers have been pushing for payments that scale up the more their content is used. Last week, Microsoft rolled out a service connecting publishers with AI buyers.

Amazon Web Services is hosting a conference for publishers in New York on Tuesday. Ahead of the conference, AWS has circulated slides that mention a content marketplace. Slides seen by The Information show AWS grouping the marketplace with its core AI tools, including Bedrock and Quick Suite, when describing products publishers can use in their businesses.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company “has built long-lasting, innovative relationships with publishers across many areas of our business,” including its AWS cloud unit, retail, advertising, AI and Alexa. “We are always innovating together to best serve our customers, but we have nothing specific to share on this subject at this time.”

Publishers have increasingly complained that the popularity of AI chats and AI-powered search summaries means online search is driving fewer people to their sites, hurting readership and advertising revenue. For instance, The Washington Post in part blamed declining search traffic and the rise of generative AI when it laid off staff last week.

Publishers’ woes have also prompted legal fights. In September, for instance, Rolling Stone publisher Penske Media sued Google, alleging that its introduction of AI summaries to search results had hurt Penske’s revenue. Google has filed to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it has no obligation to send Penske traffic or deal with the publisher on its preferred terms.

Companies including Amazon have already signed AI-related licensing agreements with certain publishers directly, typically in deals with flat fees. Amazon, for its part, is paying a reported $20 million–plus per year to The New York Times to use content like news articles and NYT Cooking recipes in its Alexa assistant and to train its AI models.

When Amazon last week rolled out a free chatbot version of its Alexa+ assistant, it said it has partnered with more than 200 outlets including The Washington Post, Forbes and Time to bring content to Alexa. Anyone with an Amazon login can now access the free version via a web browser, though it will have a cap on consumer usage.

Publishers are increasingly seeking ways to get paid based on how often AI firms use their content, which they believe is a more sustainable business that will scale up revenue as consumers’ AI usage continues to grow.

Cloudflare and Akamai, which help clients including publishers run their sites, started offering tools in the second half of 2025 to help publishers both prevent AI bots from crawling their sites and charge AI firms for access. AWS has a similar service, CloudFront.

Microsoft, for its part, started piloting its own marketplace last year, lining up publishers including People Inc. and Condé Nast. When it announced a broader rollout last week, it said it had been testing the marketplace by using content in business and consumer versions of Microsoft Copilot before opening the service up to buyers.

But some technical challenges remain to getting AI firms to comply with any efforts to get paid. For instance, some AI bots, which at times disguise their activity to look like human visits, can thwart efforts to lock down content.

And in general, publishers are worried that little demand will materialize from AI firms on the buying side of content marketplaces, multiple publishing industry executives have said. In the case of Microsoft, the company has so far publicly named only Yahoo as a content buyer on its marketplace. (Yahoo launched a new AI search chatbot in late January.)