According to two individuals familiar with the discussions, Amazon.com has informed publishing industry executives of its plan to launch a content marketplace where publishers can sell content to companies developing AI products.

These talks occur as publishers and AI firms negotiate how AI companies access online content—whether for model training or answering user queries. Publishers are advocating for compensation models based on the volume of content used. Last week, Microsoft introduced a service connecting publishers with AI buyers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is scheduled to host a publishers conference in New York on Tuesday. Ahead of the event, AWS distributed presentation materials referencing the content platform. Slides reviewed by The Information indicate that AWS categorizes the platform alongside core AI tools like Bedrock and QuickSight as products available to publishers.

An Amazon.com spokesperson stated that the company "has long-standing, innovative partnerships with publishers across many areas of its business," including AWS, retail, advertising, AI, and Alexa. "We are constantly innovating with our partners to best serve customers, but do not have specific information to share at this time."

Publishers increasingly complain that the popularity of AI chatbots and AI-powered search summaries has reduced traffic from search engines to their websites, hurting readership and ad revenue. For example, when The Washington Post conducted layoffs last week, it partly attributed the move to declining search traffic and the rise of generative AI.

Publishing challenges have also led to legal disputes. In September last year, Penske Media, parent company of Rolling Stone, sued Google, alleging that incorporating AI summaries into search results harmed its revenue. Google has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing it has no obligation to direct traffic to Penske or collaborate on the latter's preferred terms.

Some companies, including Amazon.com, have directly signed AI-related licensing agreements with certain publishers, typically involving fixed fees. It has been reported that Amazon.com pays The New York Times over $20 million annually to use news articles, NYT Cooking recipes, and other content in its Alexa assistant and to train its AI models.

When Amazon.com launched the free version of Alexa+ last week, a chatbot, it noted collaborations with over 200 media outlets, including The Washington Post, Forbes, and Time, to supply content for Alexa. Any user with an Amazon.com account can now access the free version via a web browser, subject to usage limits.

Publishers are increasingly seeking payment models based on how frequently AI companies use their content, viewing this as a more sustainable business approach that scales with growing AI usage.

Cloudflare and Akamai, which provide website operation support for publishers, began offering tools in the second half of 2025 to help publishers block AI web crawlers from scraping content and to charge AI companies for access. AWS offers a similar service called CloudFront.

Microsoft began piloting its own content marketplace last year, integrating publishers such as People Inc. and Condé Nast. When announcing the full launch last week, Microsoft stated it had tested the platform with its commercial and consumer versions of Copilot before opening it to external buyers.

However, technical challenges remain in ensuring AI companies comply with payment structures. For instance, some AI crawlers occasionally disguise themselves as human visitors, undermining content protection measures.

Several publishing executives expressed overall concern that AI content marketplaces may lack sufficient demand from AI buyers. Microsoft, for example, has so far only publicly named Yahoo as a content buyer—Yahoo launched a new AI search chatbot at the end of January.