If you can’t measure how AI systems use your content, you can’t price it — and two publisher-led efforts launched this month are attacking exactly that. SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights) is a publisher coalition building a telemetry standard that tracks five events: content retrieved, grounded, cited, displayed and engaged. Its technical working group published the spec on June 12, and public comment is open through July 24, 2026 — five days from now. Separately, Next Net and Sundial Media & Technology Group launched SAIL, the Standardized Agentic Intelligence Ledger, a record-keeping system tracking how AI systems use publisher content and blend it with other sources. Different mechanisms, same underlying bet: build the meter yourselves.
01What SPUR is and who’s behind it
SPUR’s founding members are the BBC, Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky, The Times of London and MediaHaus. The Associated Press has joined — MediaHaus CEO Gert Ysebaert called AP’s participation a “milestone,” given AP’s depth of licensing experience. The coalition now spans 30 publisher members and six affiliates.
The five-event structure is the substance. Retrieved, grounded, cited, displayed, engaged are meaningfully different things with meaningfully different values, and today they’re all invisible and therefore all priced at zero. Distinguishing between content an AI merely retrieved and content it grounded an answer in is the precondition for any licensing model more sophisticated than a flat annual fee.
The unresolved obstacle is the obvious one: demand-side adoption. A telemetry standard only produces data if OpenAI and Google implement it rather than continuing to scrape untracked. SPUR has no leverage to compel that. It has a well-specified standard, a serious membership roster, and the hope that a credible measurement layer is easier to adopt than to argue against.
02What SAIL does differently
SAIL comes from Next Net, an AI licensing platform, and Sundial Media & Technology Group — publisher of Essence, Refinery29 and Afropunk. Next Net has been “vectorizing” Sundial’s catalog since January, running on NVIDIA infrastructure for third-party vendor compatibility, and SAIL is designed to be compatible with the IAB Tech Lab’s CoMP AI framework and its pay-per-query model.
Sundial CEO Kirk McDonald frames it as protecting publisher authority and ensuring AI outputs reflect editorial judgment. Next Net CEO Franklin Rios runs the technical side and takes a case-by-case negotiated percentage of the revenue returned to publishers. The pitch is accountability, referral traffic and input into training — positioned as an alternative to litigation or one-off licensing deals. Worth noting the structural difference: SPUR is a publisher-governed open standard, SAIL is a commercial platform with a revenue share. Both can be useful. They are not the same kind of thing, and you should not evaluate them the same way.
03Why this matters
| Measurement precedes pricing, always | Every licensing negotiation you've had with an AI company has been conducted without agreed usage data, which is why the numbers feel arbitrary. A working telemetry standard is what turns "what's your content worth" from a bargaining posture into an arithmetic problem. |
|---|---|
| The July 24 comment window is closing | The five events SPUR defines will determine what you can invoice for. If the distinction between grounded and merely retrieved is drawn in a way that disadvantages your content type, that's a multi-year pricing problem you had five days to prevent. |
| Coalition scale is the only leverage that works here | No single publisher makes OpenAI implement telemetry. Thirty publishers plus the AP, the BBC and the FT is a different conversation — and the CoMP compatibility means these efforts may converge rather than fragment into competing standards. |
Everywhere else this quarter, the numbers are getting worse: supply falling, accreditation lapsing, match rates collapsing.
04What publishers should do
05What marketers should do
06The bottom line
Everywhere else this quarter, the numbers are getting worse: supply falling, accreditation lapsing, match rates collapsing. This is the one place publishers are responding by building the instrument instead of waiting for someone else’s. Whether SPUR gets demand-side adoption is genuinely uncertain — and that uncertainty is the whole risk. But a coalition with the BBC, the FT, the Guardian and the AP specifying what “grounded” means is more consequential than another year of licensing deals negotiated blind. The comment window closes July 24.