News organizations are moving away from flat-fee licensing agreements and are instead seeking to be paid according to how frequently their reporting appears in answers generated by artificial-intelligence tools. Perplexity AI, an emerging search startup, has told publishers it is open to a usage-based revenue model and could debut the arrangement within weeks, according to industry participants familiar with the discussions. The push comes amid a steep rise in automated scraping of news sites for AI training. A recent survey found that AI crawlers now represent 80% of all bot traffic, led by Meta, while traffic from one of OpenAI’s crawlers jumped 305% between May 2024 and May 2025. Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at publisher platform Raptive, said the surge is prompting publishers to reassess how they monetize their content as AI products become a larger gateway for information.