Insights on AI licensing, content ownership, and the future of fair data exchange.
Licensing, usage accounting, and content transformation are three fundamentally different responsibilities, but today they are blended together. Separating them creates a better architecture for publishers and AI platforms alike.
Gary Newcomb
CTO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
AI agents behave less like bots and more like intermediated customers. If they are now part of the distribution layer, they must be understood as an audience class with acquisition cost, engagement dynamics, and retention characteristics.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Sustainable AI ecosystems will not be stabilized by escalating technical blocks or reactive licensing disputes. They will be stabilized when the most efficient behavior is also the most compliant behavior.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Publishers must now serve human comprehension and machine reasoning simultaneously. The challenge is not choosing one audience over the other; it is designing content ecosystems that preserve epistemic integrity across both.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
The most consequential flaw in today's AI content ecosystem is architectural. Retrieval systems collapse discovery and access into a single step, inverting the sequence that made the open web governable.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
In distributed systems, trust is a runtime condition. Governance that operates after ingestion is not governance at all; it is remediation. If governance is to function in AI ecosystems, it must operate at the edge.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
At scale, profitability in AI systems is determined by how much usable signal can be extracted per unit of computational cost. Structured retrieval is not an optimization detail; it is economic leverage that compounds across billions of interactions.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Every major transformation in media has been a redistribution of distribution power. Publishers may remain visible inside AI-generated outputs, yet the context is no longer under their control. Exposure persists, but structural leverage migrates.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Static contracts struggle to capture the nuance of AI retrieval, where queries are dynamic and content is synthesized in real time. Licensing must move from abstract agreement to executable infrastructure.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
When synthesis replaces referral, scrape-based access ceases to function as a stable economic model. The transition from crawl to contract is not ideological; it is structural.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
When synthesis replaces referral as the primary mode of interaction, editorial authority faces a new threat: compression. Narrative arc, evidentiary scaffolding, and contextual framing are precisely what generative systems strip away.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
In AI-mediated environments, visible attribution is no longer sufficient. When content fragments are retrieved and synthesized at scale, attribution must operate at a structural level. Machine-readable provenance becomes the foundation of trust.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
The AI era is a structural inflection point in distribution infrastructure. The dominant design has not yet crystallized, and decisions made in this period will define leverage for the next decade.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
FetchRight and Peek-Then-Pay let LLMs ask publishers directly for pre-filtered, attribution-ready context — cutting duplicate embedding work and lowering costs for both sides.
Gary Newcomb
CTO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
The audience has migrated to AI-driven discovery channels. Publishers who structure and govern what they contribute can become essential partners in the AI economy.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Every AI query burns thousands of tokens just to reacquire context. FetchRight and Peek-Then-Pay offer a smarter approach where publishers provide structured data and LLMs pay for efficiency, not redundancy.
Gary Newcomb
CTO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Accuracy cannot be treated as an emergent property of scale. It has to be grounded in authoritative sources, and those sources are overwhelmingly publishers.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
How the Peek-Then-Pay standard is reshaping the relationship between AI systems and content creators, giving publishers control while enabling efficient AI development.
Gary Newcomb
CTO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Publishers' biggest readers are no longer human — they're AI systems. Yet most publishers have no visibility into this interaction. Closing that gap is the first step toward deciding how AI should use your content.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Publishers can choose how their content powers AI — its structure, terms, and representation. This strategic shift turns content from ungoverned raw material into governed expertise.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
AI upends the logic of pages as the atomic unit of value. Publishers can allow their content to be atomized without input, or they can define how their expertise is represented in the new answer layer.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
When discovery moves from pages to answers, the value of expertise increases. Publishers have an opportunity not just to participate in the AI ecosystem, but to shape its trajectory.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
AI has outgrown the infrastructure of the early web. Peek-Then-Pay provides the modern protocol this era requires: structured discovery, transparent licensing, and aligned incentives.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how people seek and consume information. But AI runs on trusted data, and trusted data originates with publishers.
Jarrett Sidaway
CEO & Co-Founder, FetchRight
Cloudflare's Pay-Per-Crawl model signals a turning point. We can either create fragmented paywalls or build sustainable, fair content marketplaces. The choice is ours.
Gary Newcomb
CTO & Co-Founder, FetchRight