Our proposed Content Attribution Payment Scheme — a framework to fairly attribute and pay creators when AI systems use their content.
CAPS (Content Attribution Payment Scheme) is our proposed framework for fixing the broken economics of the AI-era web: AI assistants synthesise answers from publishers' content while the traffic and ad revenue that funded that content collapse. Something has to reconnect value to the people who create it.
We argue the usual "solutions" all fail. Paywalls and robots.txt blocking trade slow death for fast death by making you invisible to AI. Litigation and licensing deals only pay the largest publishers with legal teams. Traditional ads are already failing. And post-hoc generate-then-ground citation can't reliably attribute an answer to specific sources, so it can't fairly compensate them.
CAPS instead envisions attribution and micropayments built into how AI grounds and cites content, so creators are paid when their work is used. It's a direct response to the pressures driving AI crawler blocking and to the attribution gap at the heart of grounding.
