Shared standards for content usage reporting
An invitation to contribute
Visibility into the influence and usage of content in AI platforms and agents offers opportunities for both content owners and creators as well as agent and model builders.
For an AI systems builder, reporting is becoming a standard requirement to access the licensed, premium content that makes for a high quality model and RAG system - it also provides the opportunity for standardised evaluation and auditing of response quality, integrity, and usefulness.
By reporting content usage events a platform or agent also creates an environment where content creators can understand where their work is most valuable and where they should focus their content creation to ensure that the agent, platform, and end user receive relevant data. This cycle has been proven in countless distribution channels - when a content creator understands their audience they make better content, and the distribution and consumption layers (in this case AI systems) reap the benefit.
The SPUR Coalition of publishers - spurcoalition.org - is opening the draft of the Content Telemetry standard and SPUR telemetry profile for public comment and invites you to contribute - together these two specifications form a coherent, standardised system by which AI agent and model builders can report back content usage events while protecting user privacy and intellectual property.
The standard defines 5 key events:
Content retrieval
Content grounded
Content cited
Content displayed
Content engaged
The profile sets out proposed terms for delivering those events - real-time, event level, and to an endpoint declared by the content owner.
Our aim is to develop a common language for measuring and reporting on content usage, and to align with licensing and compensation frameworks. We want to achieve this collaboratively with publishers, website and content owners more broadly including brands and merchants (via the OpenAttribution initiative), analytics and reporting platforms, content marketplaces, frontier model labs, and developers to ensure a robust ecosystem of implementers and contributors. This effort also aligns with efforts from standards organisations working on licensing and compensation - ex. Really Simple Licensing (rslstandard.org), IAB CoMP, and others - and with their collaboration are incorporated into their licensing and access efforts.
Public comments are welcome as issues on the GitHub repositories listed, or submitted directly to Alex Springer, technical lead for the SPUR coalition and maintainer of the standard and profile, at alex@spurcoalition.org. The public comment period will run from June 11 to July 10 followed by a brief review and revised version of both published by August 10.
Github repositories:
Telemetry standard: https://github.com/SPUR-Coalition/telemetry
SPUR telemetry profile: https://github.com/SPUR-Coalition/telemetry-profile
SPUR Coalition
June 2026
Notes to editors
About the SPUR Coalition: The SPUR Coalition (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights) is a non-profit coalition of news publishers established to shape the technical and commercial environment within which IP owners can control and monitor the use of their content by generative AI applications. Founding members are the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian Media Group, Mediahuis, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group. The coalition is funded by its members.
Media enquiries:
SPUR Coalition: media.enquiries@spurcoalition.org