The Movement for an Open Web (MOW) has launched the Search Only Contract (SOC), a free website usage contract that lets publishers charge AI companies for harvesting their content.
The contract sits in a site's Robots.txt file or footer, and when an AI crawler visits the site it is treated as having agreed to the terms. Normal search indexing is allowed, and so is human non-commercial reading. But using the content to train AI models or to generate the AI summaries that now appear at the top of Google search results instead of linking to the original article requires a paid agreement with the publisher. If a company takes the content without paying, the publisher can invoice them, and if that goes unpaid, they can pursue the claim through the County Court rather than going through the much longer and more expensive route of an intellectual property case.
MOW chose contract law over copyright deliberately, arguing that copyright cases take too long and cost too much for most publishers to pursue. The legal questions around AI and copyright remain deeply unsettled, with cases moving through courts in the UK, US and EU that will take years to resolve and may produce outcomes that are narrow or immediately appealed. On the other hand, contract law requires a simpler chain of proof in that terms were set, the site was accessed, and those terms were consequently broken, with enforcement through the County Court being faster and cheaper than pursuing an intellectual property case through the higher courts.
Thirty-one sites had already signed up before the formal launch, including Trusted Reviews, Road.cc and CaughtOffside, and industry bodies including the AOP, PPA, Thinkbox, Impress and the Football Writers' Association have all publicly backed the initiative.
The launch comes after the CMA ruled that Google cannot penalise publishers in search rankings for restricting how their content is used by AI systems — which had been the main commercial risk putting publishers off pushing back.
The SOC is free to use, with a setup guide available at m4ow.uk/socw.