Making AI search smarter
Jul 1, 2026Matthew Conroy

Summary
This post introduces initiatives to make AI search smarter by leveraging network signals for content freshness and relevance, aiming to reduce unnecessary crawling and establish new economic models for content creators. It also details the evolution of 'Pay Per Crawl' to 'Pay Per Use' with partners like Ceramic.ai and You.com, enabling content owners to be compensated based on usage in AI answers and providing new reporting for answer engine optimization.
More from the Artificial Intelligence Integration & Impact trail
- Introducing Clef-omni with full multimodality, plus a faster Clef and a cheaper Clef-flash
- Introducing Web Search API via AI Gateway
- Introducing Clef: our open-source decision models, and new RL fine-tuning platform
- One year later: Sovereign AI and the fight for choice
- AI Search is now generally available