IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising standard-setting body, today announced a standardised framework to guarantee LLMs – like ChatGPT and Claude – have agreements with publishers before using their content.
The framework, titled CoMP (Content Monetisation Framework), aims to help publishers protect their content from being scraped by AI companies without permission or payment, and ensures commercial conversations take place before any content crawling occurs.
The IAB Tech Lab said that CoMP is not meant to replace existing ways publishers block AI companies from accessing their content. Instead, it assumes publishers already have tools in place – such as systems that control access to their websites – to stop unwanted scraping.
With those protections in mind, CoMP provides a standard way for AI companies to request permission and potentially pay to use that content for a fee.
The protocol has gotten support from some publishers, including US digital and print media publisher People Inc. “We know the best AI products require the best inputs and the AI economy will need more quality content in the future, not less,” said Jon Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer, People Inc.
“A global information economy needs global standards and we have been a supporter of the IAB CoMP initiative from the beginning. We support global standards that help all creators get paid fairly.”
The framework will be available for public comment until 9th April 2026, so that industry players can share their feedback.
A Loss in Publisher Traffic
Publications have suffered major online traffic depreciation because of AI companies scraping their content, and surfacing that content in their AI tools.
Because of this, more internet users are navigating less to publisher websites for information and more to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini.
Google’s AI Mode and Overviews – which features a summary of web information at the top of the search engine’s page – has been the AI tool responsible for a considerable amount of this traffic decline.
As a result, many publishers have entered lucrative content licensing agreements with AI companies, and many have also sued the same companies for taking their content without compensation.
News Corp, TIME, and The Associated Press have all entered agreements with OpenAI, while the New York Times has filed a copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI.
“AI systems require chips, power, and information. Information is the only input in that equation that does not yet have a consistent commercial infrastructure around it,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab.
A Standard Protocol for Content Monetisation
IAB Tech Lab said in a statement that the framework would let publishers and AI companies have a single standardised protocol, as opposed to building bespoke integrations individually for each agreement.
The body also explained that the standard would work across direct licensing agreements and third-party marketplaces.
“If we expect high-quality content to continue fueling AI-driven products, we need clear terms of engagement and a mechanism that supports compensation, accountability, and long-term sustainability. CoMP is designed to help the industry move in that direction,” continued Katsur.
