The news Monday that Google is planning to launch an update to its search engine that includes answers generated by artificial intelligence likely has news publishers, content creators and all kinds of destination websites panicking about a traffic collapse. News publishers may find they have plenty of allies in urging Congress to act and joining lawsuits against the Big Tech companies.

Still, The Washington Post predicts “carnage” as the old model — where human eyeballs look at content monetized by advertising — will end as people no longer go to particular websites for information.

“The days when it mattered whether a company was third or fourth on the Google search page are over because AI agents will scrape all of the web to get results,” said Toshit Panigrahi, co-founder of a licensing firm called TollBit, which is working with publishers to monetize their data.

Publishers have been bracing for this news for some time.

As they negotiate licenses with companies that have built large language models, they are starting to think about how to assign a dollar value to their news. There are three parts to this problem: