Inside the push for content compensation in the agentic era

In 2026, brands have approximately 1 million ways to place ads, whether via sponsored placements in creator videos, banner ads across the open web, or in any of the new ad formats digital giants roll out every year.

But what happens to targeting and monetizing audiences when bots increasingly surf the web on behalf of humans who once eyeballed those ads?

It’s a question that has spawned a new class of companies that aim to help brands, creators, and publishers get compensated for content that’s almost certainly being crawled. However, experts say there’s still a lack of awareness of the issue across the board as stakeholders grapple with the overall upheaval that AI has brought to many verticals, coupled with a lack of uniform standards around measuring the monetary value of pieces of content, creating a number of challenges for stakeholders.

“Publishers have many ways by which they monetize human traffic, whether that’s programmatic advertising or subscriptions and paywalls,” Toshit Panigrahi, CEO and co-founder of AI traffic management platform Tollbit, told Marketing Brew. “But in the future, humans might not be clicking through, and if you’re losing a human visitor, then you could need an altered way to monetize that traffic.”

The implications could also stand to affect the creator economy, if creator content is being digested without appropriate credit.

“There has to be shared governance and standards for how content gets licensed, used, and paid for in agentic web,” Li Haslett Chen, founder and CEO at creator commerce platform Howl, told us. “This is not the job of one company. This is the job of all of the platforms.”

Get a clue

For brands, tackling the issue requires, firstly, being aware of the issue. However, “most people are still trying to wrap their heads around what AI is” and clients are striving to put out enough content to feed LLMs, Noah Eisemann, global executive director, creator and influence at VML, told us, meaning that uncompensated content scraping might not be fully on the radar. He predicted that we are two or three years away from AI traffic compensation-related technologies “even being something that most [companies] are considering adding into their tech stack, if at all.”

Creators, who may also be directly impacted by any compensation shifts, could benefit from thinking about how they can be compensated for their content in an agentic era, Eisemann said.

A royalty-based system, in which creators are paid based on content performance rather than earning a flat fee, could be an option, he suggested, but he said many of the brands creators may be working with aren’t yet thinking about payment outside of the long-established flat-fee structure.

Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be broad consensus among creators when it comes to AI use of their content. As of last year, only around half of creators agreed with the statement that “generative AI has led to more copyright infringement and IP theft in the creator economy,” according to a study conducted by creator agency Billion Dollar Boy.

“It’s a whole new Wild West,” Eisemann said.

Reinvent the wheel?

As the conversation around content compensation in the agentic era evolves, some brands are coming to grips with the idea that trying to block bots can pose more obstacles, Panigrahi said. And then there’s the other issue, where bots can potentially bypass attempts to block them by mimicking human-like behavior.

“It becomes harder to detect and more expensive to detect, and then you end up in this endless cat-and-mouse game,” he said.

There’s also a lack of consensus among industry stakeholders on how to decide what to charge for a specific agentic transaction, according to experts Marketing Brew spoke with.

In an April interview with The Atlantic, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floated the idea of micropayments (which were first touted more than a decade ago as a way to save the publishing industry) as a way to provide revenue-sharing opportunities in the agentic era.

“[What] really makes sense in a world of agents is we try a micropayment-based approach. So if my agent wants to come read Nick Thompson’s article, Nick Thompson or The Atlantic can set a price for the agent to read it—might be different than a human reading it. My agent can read it, pay $0.17, and give me a summary of that. If I want to go read the whole article, pay $1 right then, or however that works.”

Across the web, there are some efforts to build those systems. In May, the AI infrastructure company Parallel Web Systems, which was founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal, debuted a program called Index with launch partners including publishers like PR Newswire and Fortune, media companies like the AI-focused publication Every, and Alex Heath’s Sources newsletter. The platform determines payouts in part based on a calculation of the content’s “Shapely value,” which takes into account the uniqueness of the content, Agarwal explained in an interview with Stratechery at the time.

Dan Shipper, CEO and co-founder of Every, said he is skeptical of micropayment arrangements because content providers might make a pittance, “pennies or tenths of pennies,” from each individual citation. With that said, he is OK with his content being crawled for now, because if it is being crawled, it is possible that it will be recommended to users more often.

“I actually look at it as just a holding service area to spread our ideas and our brand,” Shipper said.

Tollbit, which works with publishers, marketers, and commerce brands, allows its customers to set CPM rates, Panigrahi said, which allows them to “use the market dynamics” to make adjustments.

As new systems are devised, some in the creator industry are arguing for a more standardized approach that can support those outside of traditional publishing frameworks. Chen, from Howl, told Marketing Brew that industry players should come together to create a “creator commerce protocol” that standardizes “how content gets licensed, used, and paid for in agentic web.”

“Creators make content for a living, so when AI uses content without the right shared protocols and standards, it messes with their financial livelihood,” she said. “If I ask an AI agent to put all of the products from a creator’s video into my shopping cart, it is not credited today to the creator. This can all change.”

As the industry grapples with the question of compensation in the agentic era, it remains to be seen what role ads themselves will play in the future. Advertising has always offered a way for publishers and creators to make money as they put free content on the open web. With more agents in the mix, content creators and publishers may be less incentivized to keep their content on the open web, Agarwal argued when speaking to Stratechery.

Chen took a more optimistic view of ads in the agentic era, suggesting that they may help customer acquisition with the help of agents.

“I could ask [the agent], ‘Hey, this ad seems interesting, but I’m concerned that the product that’s being marketed to me won’t actually be good for traveling. Can you figure this out for me?’” she said. “Ads help brands acquire customers. They’re supposed to get your attention and effectively sell you on either being interested in a product or interested enough to purchase a product. Agents can actually be a layer in between…That’s where ads can continue to exist.”