This Week in M&A Issue #223

In this episode of The Opportunity podcast, remote sales expert Kai Law breaks down when founder-led sales becomes a bottleneck and how to step out without killing momentum. We cover:

✔️How to spot the warning signs early
✔️Which roles to hire first
✔️How to structure compensation
✔️When it makes sense to build an in-house sales team versus using an agency

If you’re still closing every deal and feeling the strain, this episode is for you.

Microsoft Advertising has launched the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), a new platform that lets publishers license their content to AI systems and get paid when AI uses it to generate answers.

PCM works by connecting publishers and AI developers directly. Publishers decide the rules for how their content can be used, while AI builders can find and license content for specific purposes. The platform also provides reports so publishers can see how their content is being used and where it has the most impact.

The marketplace is designed to be easy to scale. It avoids one-off deals between individual publishers and AI companies. Participation is optional, publishers keep ownership of their content, and editorial independence stays intact. PCM is open to both large media companies and smaller niche publishers.

Microsoft has already tested PCM with major U.S. publishers like Business Insider, Condé Nast, Hearst, The Associated Press, USA TODAY, and Vox Media. Early pilots used licensed content to power Microsoft Copilot responses. Yahoo is one of the first companies using the marketplace to access this content.

Microsoft plans to expand PCM to more publishers and AI developers who want to ensure high-quality content is respected, tracked, and paid for.

This comes as AI challenges the old model of the web. Traditionally, publishers earned money by sending readers to websites through clicks. AI can give answers directly, bypassing clicks but still using premium content. PCM provides a way to fairly compensate publishers for the content that powers AI.

Cloudflare has released new data that highlights just how much of the internet Google can see compared to its AI rivals, and the gap is not small.

Over a two-month period, Google’s web crawler, Googlebot, accessed about 3.2 times more unique web pages than OpenAI’s GPTBot. It also saw nearly five times more pages than Microsoft’s Bingbot, and dramatically more than smaller AI crawlers. In simple terms, Google has a much broader view of the web than almost anyone else building AI.

This is largely because Googlebot is a dual-purpose crawler. It gathers content for traditional search results and for AI features like AI Overviews at the same time. For publishers, Google Search remains a major source of traffic and revenue, so blocking Googlebot is rarely an option, even if they are uncomfortable with their content being reused in generative AI responses.

Cloudflare’s data shows this tradeoff clearly. Websites are far more likely to block dedicated AI crawlers such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot, while keeping Googlebot fully open. Publishers want search visibility, but they are increasingly wary of AI features that answer questions directly and send little traffic back to the original source.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says this dynamic gives Google a built-in advantage. Access to large amounts of data is one of the most important inputs for AI, and Google’s search dominance lets it collect content that competitors simply cannot reach.

Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review backs this up. During October and November, Googlebot reached 11.6 percent of unique web pages, compared with just 3.6 percent for GPTBot. Prince describes this as a structural imbalance rather than fair competition.

The debate is now in regulators’ hands. The UK Competition and Markets Authority is consulting on new rules after designating Google with Strategic Market Status in search. While the CMA has proposed clearer opt-out controls for publishers, Cloudflare and major media groups argue the real solution is to split Googlebot into separate crawlers, allowing search and AI access to be controlled independently.

Google Sees Record Search Growth with AI Features