Yahoo CEO says micropayments will never be enough for publishers

Yahoo will keep its AI answer engine Scout full of links back to publishers, CEO Jim Lanzone said on Wednesday. He spoke on stage at HumanX in Amsterdam. He also said micropayments from AI companies will never pay publishers enough.

“The large language models effectively photocopied the entire internet to build their answers, without linking back,” Lanzone said.

Unlike the large language models or Google’s AI Mode, Scout shows many blue links to publishers, he said. He gave two reasons. Users need to see sources because these systems often get things wrong or serve outdated information. Sending traffic back is also part of the internet’s social contract, he said, and he hopes other AI answer engines copy Scout’s design.

How Scout works

Yahoo Scout launched in beta in the first quarter, Yahoo’s first search engine of its own in 17 years. Yahoo outsourced search to Microsoft in 2009, and to...

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