News Publishers with AI Partnerships in 2026

• OpenAI partners broadly, but partnerships don’t guarantee ChatGPT citations.
• Google uses very little licensed news data for LLM training beyond Associated Press.
• Perplexity signs the most publishers, and gets blocked the most.
• Microsoft’s deals mainly support Copilot.
• Meta mixes licensed news with user content, limiting partner impact.
• No AI company clearly explains how licensed content is used.

People are changing where they obtain their news.

In 2025, Neiman Lab reported that social media and video platforms had overtaken TV and online news sites as users’ primary news sources. Some (though fewer) seem to be getting their news from AI.

Amid this and users’ growing adoption of AI, new sites continue to see declining traffic and ad revenue in 2026.

Many news sites are entering into lucrative content licensing agreements with various AI technologies to train AI models.

From the perspectives of digital PR and SEO, these deals may be an Achilles’ heel for AI.

Although we don’t know to what extent the training data is actually getting used, the thinking is that you have a better chance of getting your brand mentioned and cited by AI if you target publishers with AI partnerships.

Here’s a quick breakdown of AI platforms from Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, Meta, and Microsoft that partner with news publishers.

Note: This post will be updated regularly.

Jump to the full list.

News Publisher Partnering with OpenAI

OpenAI, which powers ChatGPT, has numerous partnerships with media companies and individual publishers.

Here they are:

NewsCorp, Condé Nast, Hearst, and People Inc, (formerly Dotdash Meredith) are probably the most significant in terms of sheer volume.

Note that some of these are massive media companies with lots of publisher sites beneath them, whereas others are individual sites.

We looked at the top sites showing up in ChatGPT citations in a recent study.

The results were underwhelming, and there wasn’t much of a correlation between partnerships and number of citations coming from ChatGPT.

News Publishers Partnering with Google

The Associated Press is the only news publisher to partner with Google to be used for training the LLMs that power AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, to the best of our knowledge.

The other notable partnership was with Reddit, though I’m not really considering them a publisher.

Recently, Google also announced a pilot program with a large number of publishers. According to Google, some of these are “The Guardian, The Times of India, The Washington Examiner, and The Washington Post, among others.”

The program will “explore how AI can help drive more engaged audiences” and “experiment with new features in Google News.”

It’s general enough that we don’t know what exactly it means, but it doesn’t sound like it has to do with training the LLM.

News Publisher Partnering with Perplexity

Perplexity has the most data partnerships with publishers at the start of 2026.

Here is a visual representation:

In our study of AI crawler bots and news publisher sites, we found that Perplexity is among the most frequently blocked technologies.

This may be the reason (or the outcome) of their high number of partnerships.

Here is the list:

News Publisher Partnering with Microsoft

As of the start of 2026, seven brands reportedly have data partnerships with Microsoft, which powers the Copilot platform.

Associated Press is probably the biggest in terms of content, followed by Reuters.

Here is the list:

(If you’re interested, Microsoft published a Copilot Usage Report at the end of 2025. It turns out that health-related topics are the most common things people search for.)

News Publisher Partnering with Meta

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram (and Threads), partners with nine publishers and media companies.

Here is the list:

From what we can glean, these partnerships are used in training alongside publicly available user content on Facebook and Instagram.

Complete List of News Publisher Partnerships with AI Companies

Here is the complete list of reported publisher partnerships with AI:

Remember, We Don’t Know How These Partnerships Work

One theory I’ve heard from agencies is that focusing on these partner sites in digital PR or SEO outreach can help brands secure AI mentions or citations.

We haven’t seen any data supporting that yet.

We also don’t know the actual details of any of these partnerships.

We don’t know which articles they draw information from, whether the information is used to “curate” datasets, or simply to train models.

Remember, right now, very few users report getting their news from AI.

Even by focusing on these sites, you may not reach the intended audiences and end users of your products (if that is indeed your true goal).

Your best bet is to focus on creating great news for relatable sites, regardless of their partnership status.

Vince Nero

Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at Buzzstream. He thinks content marketers should solve for users, not just Google. He also loves finding creative content online. His previous work includes content marketing agency Siege Media for six years, Homebuyer.com, and The Grit Group. Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, playing with his 2 kids, enjoying some video games, or watching Phillies baseball.

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Website: https://www.buzzstream.com