USA Today Co. Reformats Content for AI Ahead of New Licensing Deals
USA Today Co. is testing various ways of reformatting its website content for AI bots, with an eye toward landing new AI content licensing deals. CEO Mike Reed said on the company's August 6 earnings call: 'We understand we need to build and format content for both humans and machines. As we watch search behavior shift, we're also seeing entirely new ways to license, distribute, and monetize the trusted content we produce every day.'
Kara Childs, the company's senior vice president of product management, told Digiday that rebuilding content formats and templates makes it easier for AI systems to access, understand, and cite USA Today material — part of the company's broader generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy. Time, The Economist, and other major publishers are already testing agent-readable parallel versions of their sites, along with tighter control over which bots are allowed to crawl them.
Childs says the company is testing several approaches, including converting pages to markdown, and is tracking which bots visit the site to understand why. 'A lot of what we're doing right now is completely invisible to the average user. It's really about infrastructure, metadata, and building our formats and templates to be more discoverable for AEO and GEO,' Childs said. The company is also analyzing which format types — multi-part guides versus standalone articles, for instance — get picked up more by bots.
On the earnings call, Reed said making content 'machine-readable' is part of the company's preparation for future licensing opportunities: 'We expect more AI licensing deals this year. Our goal isn't just to sign more contracts — it's to build long-term partnerships where the value of our trusted, real-time content is properly recognized,' he said. The company currently blocks roughly 99% of the AI bots it identifies and grants access only to parties it has struck deals with — an approach also used by other publishers including The Atlantic, People Inc., Reuters, and Time.
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