SPUR Telemetry Standard Published for Public Comment

Today, the SPUR Coalition published the draft Content Telemetry standard and the accompanying SPUR telemetry profile, opening both for public comment. Together, the two specifications form a coherent, standardised system by which AI agent and model builders can report content usage events while protecting user privacy and intellectual property.

The publication follows the Coalition's announcement at WAN-IFRA's World News Media Congress in Marseille earlier this month that the SPUR Coalition is expanding, with 30 new members from all over the world. The Coalition is working to shape the technical and operating environment within which IP owners can control and monitor the use of their content by generative AI applications.

The Content Telemetry standard is the technical foundation that enables publishers and content owners to directly understand how AI systems are using their content. The standard defines five key events that follow content through an AI system: content retrieval, content grounded, content cited, content displayed and content engaged. The SPUR telemetry profile sets out proposed terms for delivering those events - in real time, at event level, to an endpoint declared by the content owner.

Jon Slade, CEO of the Financial Times, a founding member of the SPUR Coalition, said: "Tracking how AI systems use content creates benefits for everyone involved. A common standard means AI systems and their users benefit from better, more relevant outputs. For content creators, seeing how and where their work brings value within the AI environment helps them understand where to focus energy and resources for that audience. 

It's a virtuous circle that we've seen work time and again across the industry: when publishers know what resonates with a particular audience, they produce better work and everyone up and down the chain benefits."

Alex Springer, technical lead for the SPUR Coalition and maintainer of the standard and profile, said: “Our aim is to develop a common language for measuring and reporting on content usage, one that licensing and compensation frameworks can build on. We want the draft to represent events and data relevant to all actors in this ecosystem, which is why the comment window is open to everyone - publishers, platforms, model labs and developers alike.”

The Coalition is developing the specifications collaboratively with publishers and with website and content owners more broadly, alongside analytics and reporting platforms, standards organisations, content marketplaces, frontier model labs and developers.

The publication delivers on a commitment made in the Coalition's founding open letter: to 'develop shared industry standards, creating responsible pathways for original journalism to be used sustainably'.

The public comment period runs from 12 June to 10 July 2026, followed by a brief review, with revised versions of both specifications published by 10 August. Comments are welcome as issues on the GitHub repositories below, or directly to Alex Springer at alex@spurcoalition.org.

Content Telemetry standard: https://github.com/SPUR-Coalition/telemetry

SPUR telemetry profile: https://github.com/SPUR-Coalition/telemetry-profile

Publishers and affiliated organisations interested in joining SPUR can get in touch at info@spurcoalition.org.