CAPS
Our proposed Content Attribution Payment Scheme — a framework to fairly attribute and pay creators when AI systems use their content.
The economics of the AI-era web are broken. As AI assistants synthesize answers directly from publishers' content, the traffic and ad revenue that used to fund those creators are collapsing. We need a way to reconnect value to the people who actually produce the information.
The usual solutions simply do not work. Putting up paywalls or blocking AI crawlers is just choosing a slow death over a fast one, because it makes your content invisible to the future of search. Big lawsuits and exclusive licensing deals only benefit the largest publishers with massive legal teams. Meanwhile, traditional ads are already failing, and current AI models cannot reliably attribute their answers to specific sources after the fact, making fair compensation impossible.
That is why we propose CAPS, the Content Attribution Payment Scheme. CAPS is a framework designed to build attribution and micropayments directly into how AI models find and cite content. Instead of trying to figure out sources after an answer is generated, this system ensures creators are tracked and paid the moment their work is used to ground an AI's response. It is a direct solution to the attribution gap, offering a sustainable path forward for creators in the age of AI.
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.