Key facts
- Over 80 publishers have joined the SPUR coalition to address AI firms using their content without permission.
- The coalition aims to develop industry-wide standards and technical systems for tracking AI content usage.
- New members include The Atlantic and Brazil's National Association of Newspapers.
- Founding members of SPUR include the Financial Times, BBC, and Associated Press.
- Publishers are concerned about AI companies using their content to train large language models.
- Google organic-search referrals to over 2,500 websites fell 33% globally between November 2024 and November 2025.
More than 80 publishers globally, including The New York Times, Agence France-Presse, and The Economist, have joined the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) coalition. The group aims to prevent artificial intelligence firms from using their content without permission to train large language models.
Launched in February, SPUR now includes over 80 members across more than 20 countries, with new additions like The Atlantic and Brazil's National Association of Newspapers joining founding members such as the Financial Times, BBC, and Associated Press. Publishers are increasingly pursuing legal avenues, with USA Today and several of its owned newspapers recently suing OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement. OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, are also facing similar claims from other news organizations and authors, including The New York Times.
SPUR, funded by its members, is developing industry-wide standards and technical systems to help publishers track and control how AI companies utilize their content, and to facilitate licensing agreements. According to its website, the coalition recently introduced its Content Telemetry Standard, designed to standardize how AI agents record and report their media content usage, aiming to ensure creators are compensated.
Publishers are also contending with declining referral traffic from search engines that are rolling out AI-generated answers, which allow users to access information without clicking through to original websites. A Reuters Institute report, citing data from Chartbeat, indicated that Google organic-search referrals to over 2,500 websites fell 33% globally between November 2024 and November 2025.