NLA Media Access launches free service pooling publisher traffic data to spot AI scrapers

NLA Media Access, the publisher-owned UK licensing organisation that represents about 14,000 titles, has launched a free service intended to reveal who is harvesting news content at scale, including for AI. Called the Collective Intelligence Advisory Service, it was first reported by Press Gazette on October 29, 2026, and announced in more detail on October 30.

How the service works

According to InPublishing, the service combines web server and content delivery network (CDN) access logs from participating publishers and pairs them with NLA's knowledge of licensing markets such as media monitoring, text and data mining and AI. Looking across several sites at once is the key idea. Chief executive Henry Jones told Press Gazette that a visitor reading hundreds of articles on one site could be a loyal reader, but the same heavy activity spread across several publishers points to a bot. That matters because many scrapers ignore robots.txt instructions and some disguise themselves as human visitors.

NLA says the analysis sorts organisations into three groups: those whose automated access could become a new licensing deal, those operating outside existing licences, and those whose activity may be infringement requiring investigation. The service extends NLA's Text Tracker tool, which Press Gazette says has removed more than 150,000 infringing items so far this year, including over 40 entire websites.

What the pilot found

NLA tested the approach with Newsquest and three national publishers, among them The Telegraph. The pilot identified companies in Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region that appeared to assume they could use the content; when told otherwise, some asked for licence terms. Paul Lomax, NLA's chief digital officer, said the pilot also uncovered "clear, systematic theft through spoof IP addresses," which the organisation says it is now pursuing.

License first, court later

NLA already sells licences that permit scraping for a fee, with narrow limits on use. Jones expects most disputes to be settled after pre-action legal letters, but said some organisations will resist and that a formal collective action is likely within 18 months. Pooling cases, he argued, makes litigation more affordable than individual publishers suing alone. The launch comes after publisher bodies objected to Meta's planned terms update, which would have granted it broad rights to scrape content from publishers' accounts on its platforms; Meta delayed the plan and promised a consultation. How much revenue the service will generate remains an open question.