Google Built a Pay Button for the Content It Feeds Into AI Answers

Welcome to the AI Industry Report, daily AI news for small business, built by AI, about AI, from the Agentic Marketing Academy. It’s Monday, September 14th. Three stories, one rumor, and Google has started paying people for the content it feeds into AI answers. Let’s go.

Okay, the big one first. For about two years now, the arrangement has been the same, and you’ve heard me complain about it. AI reads what you wrote, answers the customer with it, and you get nothing. No click, no call, no thank you. Well. Google has built a pay button. It’s called the AI contribution pilot, and it showed up this morning in a Digiday report with the actual help document attached. Here’s how it works. If you’re in the pilot, a new earnings widget appears inside your Google Search Console. When one of your pages contributes significantly to an AI answer in AI Overviews, AI Mode, or the Gemini app, you accrue money. You add your bank details, you watch the number, you can quit whenever you want. Now, the fine print is the interesting part. Google only pays when your page helped write the answer. If it just confirmed a fact, or got linked underneath after the answer was already generated, that doesn’t count. So being cited isn’t the thing. Being the reason the answer exists is the thing. Two caveats before you get excited. It’s invite only, so there’s nothing to sign up for. And Digiday says critics see this as a legal fig leaf rather than real money, while Google calls it an early stage learning pilot. Why do I care if I can’t join? Because it tells you what Google is measuring. Original material nobody else has is what shapes an answer. Repeating what’s already out there only confirms one. Source: Digiday, September 14th, with Google confirming, via Search Engine Roundtable.

Now, remember the story from a week ago, where somebody claimed ChatGPT had quietly stopped showing products unless the seller submits a product feed? We ran it as a rumor because nobody had numbers. Now somebody does. Profound tracked about one and three quarter million shopping prompts through July. On July 10th, in a single day, the share of ChatGPT’s product picks coming from feeds went from eight percent to sixty-two. By early September it’s around sixty-five. And here’s what that did to real stores: out of 687 they were tracking, 450 lost at least a third of their shopping visibility across that one break. The pool got smaller too. The number of different merchants getting mentioned dropped by more than twenty percent. Roughly a third of the feed traffic traced back to Shopify. Hold this one loosely, because it’s Profound watching its own customers’ prompts, not all of ChatGPT, and OpenAI hasn’t confirmed any of it. But what does it mean for you? If you sell on Shopify or Etsy, your catalog is already in the pipe and you do nothing. If you built your own cart, or you’re running a store plugin nobody’s touched in a while, go find out today whether you have a product feed at all. That’s the door now. Source: Profound, September 9th, via Search Engine Journal.

Quick one, and it’s free, and it’s been missing since 2023. Google gave you back view counts on your Business Profile posts. You know those little updates you publish on your Google listing, the offer, the event, the we’re open Labor Day post? Since February of 2023 you’ve had no idea if a single human saw them. Now there’s a number on each one, in your dashboard, going back eighteen months. Updates, offers, events, all of it, and it combines Search and Maps into one figure. Google called it one of its most requested features, which, yes, we noticed. Couple of limits. Clicks did not come back, only views. And Google hasn’t actually said what a view is, so we don’t know if it counts one person once or every time the thing appears. Still. Go look. Eighteen months of history landed in your account, and it will tell you in about four minutes which kind of post is worth writing. Source: Google’s September Small Business Bulletin, via Search Engine Journal, September 10th.

One rumor before we go. Barry Schwartz is seeing signs of a Google ranking move around September 4th that, in some cases, snapped back on the 13th. Google hasn’t announced an update and there’s nothing on its status dashboard, so this is one guy with good eyes, not a confirmed change. Costs you nothing to check: pull your own analytics for those two dates and look at your own line before you go changing anything.

So here’s your one thing for today. Open your Google Business Profile, go to Posts, and read the view counts on the last eighteen months. Find the two that people actually looked at. Write more of those.

That’s today’s report. Transcript and every source linked at A I industry report dot com.

If you want your business to be the one AI recommends, the free checklist at the leveling window dot com is where everybody starts.

And full transparency, because we practice what we teach: this show is researched, written, and voiced by AI, built by our founder. We teach businesses what AI can do. This show is the proof. Hit follow, and tomorrow’s report finds you on its own.