Writers’ Bloc

Writers’ Bloc

Writers’ Bloc helps journalists and publishers get paid when AI uses their work. We fingerprint every article, track its use across the web and in AI outputs, and create clear evidence when content is used without permission or payment.

Writers’ Bloc does three jobs:

• It proves who wrote what first
• It catches copies wherever they surface, whether that’s across the web or in an LLM
• And it charges the AI bots for access to your work

We talked to founder John Byrne about how he’d like to see publishers work differently.

Pain & Problem

93 out of 100 journalists have never received a royalty from a platform or publisher agreement for their work (ALCS & Create study, 2024).

60% of web traffic is now bots and crawlers (Cloudflare Radar, August 2026), and this percentage is growing. That means it’s likely a significant portion of your audience are bots, and you’re not monetising them, leaving you without direct revenue that you should otherwise be earning. There are also adverse indirect effects to revenue from your subscriber base and your advertising partners.

When we asked, 5 out of 6 freelance journalists and independent publishers (across 453 conversations) report that their work is showing up in places it shouldn’t, without them having given permission and without getting paid for its use.

This includes AI-generated websites and large language model (LLM) output and answers.

Smaller, independent publishers (who are not the New York Times or News Corp) cannot litigate against the AI companies, and do not have enough leverage to arrange bespoke deals. They don’t have the funds, the legal team, nor the time to invest into these lengthy, tedious pursuits.

The problem, for both publishers and the AI companies, is that there is no simple way to license content, and the incentives are misaligned such that the easiest option for the AI companies is to simply steal it and risk the legal consequences later.

There are strong echoes of the Napster problem the music industry had to face 25 years ago. Today, journalism and publishing is facing its own Napster problem.

What your colleagues and peers are saying

We built Writers’ Bloc because the industry told us something important was broken. Here it is, in their own words.

“I’m sick of my paywalled articles turning up on these AI sites within minutes. It feels like there’s nothing I can do.” Jack R.; journalist

“It took 20 years to catch up with Google on copyright. If it takes the same with AI, we’ll all be out of business.” James H.; publisher

“Running a small business, I don’t have the budget or the time for a lengthy legal process.” Jason C.; publisher

“I want to know when my work is used without payment on my end.” Harriet M.; journalist

“I don’t have the tools or the expertise to solve this problem myself.” Karol L.; publisher

“The market context is broken. We need an entirely new model for journalism.” Styli C.; publisher

“By the time I find my work copied somewhere, it’s already been scraped a hundred times over.” Nadia P.; journalist

“We pour months into investigations, and an AI summary gives it away for free the day we publish.” Tomás R.; editor

How does Writers’ Bloc work?

Writers’ Bloc helps journalists and publishers get paid when AI uses their work. We fingerprint every article, track its use across the web and in AI outputs, and create clear evidence when content is used without permission or payment. We also help rights holders monetise content by requesting payments from infringers and charging bots for access.

Our mission is to build a rights marketplace where publishers and journalists get paid fairly for their work, whilst AI companies get simple, legal access to trusted, high-quality content from reliable sources.

The “bloc” is the collective of journalists and publishers, banded together as one negotiating party: freelance journalists, small publishers and niche B2B operations, the people who get scraped the most and paid the least. Time for that to change.

Individually you’re a takedown notice. Together, you’re a force that AI companies have to negotiate with. A proper market instead of a risky lawsuit.

About founder, John Byrne