The top AI platforms for publishers, ranked

By Tim Peterson  •  January 20, 2026  •

“[2025] did feel like a real reset. If you skip back just to those early deals, it was such a different picture. Very, very bleak. So last year very much did feel like a lot more happened,” said Digiday senior media editor Jessica Davies on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

All of which puts publishers in an almost-enviable position. Not all publishers are able to partake in the buffet of AI platforms looking to pay for their content, but those that are can enjoy a fuller menu of options.

“It’s sort of open season. Now that there are more players in the space, it’s more competitive. There are more options for publishers,” said Digiday senior media reporter Sara Guaglione on the Digiday Podcast.

But then the publishers have to evaluate those options. Fortunately Davies and Guaglione have done a lot of that legwork in drafting a scorecard of the major AI platforms based on interviews with publishers. They joined the show to review the rankings and share the reasoning behind why platforms from Meta to Microsoft, Anthropic to OpenAI may rate higher or lower than you’d expect.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation — in no particular order (you’ll have to listen for the rankings) — which have been edited for length and clarity.

Google

Davies: This is the one that obviously gets publishers the most heated. But it does have now a handful of commercial partnership pilots that involve testing its AI features in Google News. And at the end of last year, it came out with a flurry of announcements, one of which was promises to provide greater linking in things like AI Mode.

Davies: Some of the publishers who have these licensing deals with Meta, they’re still blocking their crawler. But they’re supplying their content to Meta via server. And that works for Meta because they get the information faster, more efficiently without having to crawl multiple times. And it’s good for publishers because they’re not being hit multiple times. They can control their blocking strategy more easily.

Microsoft

Guaglione: Every publishing exec was so excited about what Microsoft was offering. What’s funny is what they’re offering is still unclear. They haven’t really [rolled] that out yet. But the opportunity is there for publishers.

OpenAI

Guaglione: I thought all the lawsuits, publishers in general being like “Oh, they’re scraping all of our content, not paying us money” — that’s the narrative around OpenAI for a lot of these publishers. But when you actually talk to people who are leading partnerships, business development execs at publishers, they’re like, “Oh, but OpenAI is paying people a lot of money.”