Boston Globe, Future, Vox Media join ProRata’s generative AI licensing model

Frommer’s, Homes & Gardens, The Nation, Newsday, The New Republic, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Trusted Media Brands are among those to come on board. 

They join publishers that have already announced deals with ProRata, including The Atlantic, Daily Mail, Fortune, The Guardian, Sky News and Time. Gist answers search queries using only licensed content from publisher partners.

Unlike most AI deals with publishers, which offer one-time licensing payments or lump-sum multi-year contracts based on access to archives or data, ProRata pays out 50% of all its revenue to publisher partners on a recurring basis, depending on how often their content powers AI responses. ProRata’s revenue comes entirely from advertising, though the company plans to launch subscriptions in the third quarter, according to CEO and founder, Bill Gross.

Publishers can make up to 50% of the revenue paid out to publishers when they are cited as a source in an AI generated answer. In comparison, payout to publishers from AI startup company Perplexity maxes out at 25%.

That’s made it a no-brainer for publishers. 

Execs at Boston Globe, Mansueto Ventures and Trusted Media Brands said they were drawn to ProRata’s attribution and pay-per-use model that compensates publishers based on how often they are cited in response to queries.

“We’re continuing to experiment with and adopt new models and opportunities for our brands across the AI space,” Jacob Salamon, vp of business development at Trusted Media Brands, which owns publications like Reader’s Digest, said in an email. “We appreciate the transparency, publisher credit and focus on monetization [ProRata is] bringing to the marketplace. And because ProRata aspires to help all AI search providers measure and display source attribution, it’s a partnership that will benefit all publishers in the long run.”

Unlike LLMs like GPT-4 or Claude, which generate responses from across the web and therefore make them more prone to hallucinations, Gist.ai only uses licensed content from approved publisher partners. That makes it a more controlled environment, which reduces the chance that the system pulls inaccurate, outdated or low-quality information, according to publishing execs that spoke with Digiday.

“We feel like we’ll be in good company,” said Patrick Hainault, vp of corporate business development at Mansueto Ventures. 

Another benefit to publishers is that their proprietary data isn’t used to train a tech company’s large language model when signing up for ProRata’s program. Instead, their content is accessed by Gist.ai’s search engine through retrieval augmented generation (RAG), according to Hainault.

Naturally, signing publishers is a strong start, but content supply — even from large, legacy publishers — doesn’t automatically drive user demand in AI products. Gist.ai is not yet a household name or widely used search engine, so for publisher revenue-sharing to be meaningful, it needs significant user traffic.

According to Similarweb data, Gist.ai had about 36,000 desktop and mobile web visits in April 2025. Bill Gross, founder and CEO of ProRata, claimed visitors had more than doubled, with the site attracting 100,000 visitors in May.

However, the real growth opportunity for Gist.ai is not its own landing page, according to Gross — it’s the search engine’s distribution on publishers’ own sites. 

In the next month, Gist.ai will be added to the sites of 10 publishers that are part of ProRata’s revenue share program, starting with B2B publication Adweek. Gist.ai will replace some publishers’ onsite search functions, or be added as an AI-powered search option for others, according to Gross. It’s free for publishers to add Gist.ai to their sites, he said.

“We call it distributed AI search,” Gross said. “We think of [the Gist.ai page] as the demonstration and proof of concept. But the real growth is going to be on all of our partners’ sites.”

Publishers have been using AI technology to upgrade their own onsite search since last year, according to previous Digiday reporting.

Publishers can choose for the Gist.ai search box on their sites to only surface their own content. They can also opt into having other publishers’ content surfaced in answers, or opt into having their content surfaced in Gist.ai search boxes on other publishers’ sites.

The idea is the Gist.ai search box can help drive traffic to publishers’ sites and vice versa, as Google Search referral traffic declines, Gross said. Publishers can also theoretically make money from this product. Answers to queries in Gist.ai on publishers’ sites will be monetized with ads, Gross said. ProRata’s revenue share model will apply to that revenue, too.

But these deals still represent money publishers hope to make, when user adoption and platform monetization of AI search engines improves. For now, notable revenue from AI companies is coming from licensing deals with big players like OpenAI.

“We’re not anticipating an immediate boon, but search is an enormous market. If Gist.ai – in part thanks to the goodwill it can leverage from publishers – can capture a meaningful sliver of the market, it will quickly become attractive,” Hainault said.

Gross said ProRata will start paying publishers at the end of June. Its ad platform launched in March, and runs ads across its publisher partners’ sites as well as on Gist.ai. ProRata has over 1,000 advertisers, ranging from Pizza Hut to Norwegian Cruise Line, Gross added. He declined to share how much advertising revenue ProRata has made. 

Michelle Micone, Boston Globe Media’s chief marketing & strategic initiatives officer, said, “This pilot is all about learning and represents an opportunity to experiment with a new tool that allows publishers to be compensated for their journalism and allows us to understand user needs as search behaviors continue to evolve.”

This story has been updated to reflect ProRata’s revenue share calculation.

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