The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Tech Lab has announced a proposal for a framework that would see publishers and brands being compensated for the use of their content by large language models (LLMs) and AI agents.

Named the ‘LLM Content Ingest API Initiative’, the proposed framework is a response to the rapid growth in the use of LLMs and AI-driven search which has significantly reduced publisher traffic and click-through rates online. Some sites are said to have lost up to 90% of traffic, and estimates put the annual loss in ad revenue at $2 billion.

At the same time, the IAB points to the risks to brands’ reputations and messaging if consumers increasingly rely on these systems, as they have no control over the output. LLMs can hallucinate, produce inconsistent responses, and misrepresent a brand’s message or values. In this context, the IAB states that “it is necessary to ensure the AI systems have the right information about the brands and they are all able to get it from the source of truth- the brand itself”.

Two separate technical frameworks are proposed: one for publishers; one for brands. In both cases, the frameworks are presented as ways to ensure that content is monetised “by seeking fair compensation from AI and search bots”, as well as to make sure that publishers and brands optimise for AI and develop collaborations with AI agents and LLMs. This includes, for example, ways to manage and control access to content, mechanisms that enable AI systems to easily discover and understand content, and different revenue models that can be adopted.

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