I wrote about Bill Gross, and Goto.com once. He’s a fascinating individual that figured out the key to monetizing search years before Google would eventually copy him. He has a certain way of understanding technology as inevitable and rolling along with it, rather than trying to resist it.

He appears to have made the same determination about AI. I’m not sure I agree that we should give up on the resist part, but if anybody’s going to save at least some semblance of the open web from the onslaught of AI, it may very well be Bill Gross. John Batelle, who wrote the literal book on Google, appears to agree.

Batelle has taken an interest in Gist.AI, a new startup that grew out of Gross’ startup accelerator and that he is now at the helm at. Gross is approaching the problem of AI with his usual pragmatism, and proposing a solution that focuses on partnerships between publishers and AI search.

Those ravenous AI bots hoovering up websites at a rate of thousands of crawls a day? They’re shoplifting, Gross says. AI services should pay for the privilege of ransacking the open Internet, he argues. This concept – “pay per crawl” – has already taken root: Internet infrastructure giant CloudFlare has implemented a pay-per-crawl marketplace premised on a similar philosophy. Publishers that aren’t being paid by those data-hungry AI bots can now avail themselves of a free service from CloudFlare that blocks them at the door. 

Batelle seems to seem think that Gist.AI might give publishers the tools to fight back against the larger AI companies. I’ve actually heard rumblings about Gist in the publisher world, so maybe he’s right. He certainly has been before.