Introducing Geodesix: Building the Infrastructure for Content in the AI Economy
For the past year, I have been writing about a problem: AI is built on content, but publishers are not getting paid fairly. Now let me tell you what we're doing about it!
For the past year and half, the future of content creation on the open web has kept me up at night.
Indisputably, the AI revolution is built on content. Every large language model and answer engine draws on the work of journalists, researchers, and creators who spent years developing expertise and building trust with audiences. Their words are the training data and the retrieval corpus. Their insights are what make AI actually useful.
And yet indisputably as well, the economics are broken.
Publishers are watching their referral traffic evaporate as answers replace links. They are seeing their content ingested into models with no compensation, no attribution, no sustainable path forward. The business model that funded quality content for decades is being disrupted faster than anyone anticipated.
I have spent the last 12 years at this intersection, helping publishers understand and optimize their commerce partnerships and building infrastructure that makes partnership economics work at scale. I have seen what happens when value flows fairly through an ecosystem. And I have seen what happens when it does not.
Today, I am announcing something I have been building toward for a long time.
We are launching Geodesix by impact.com.
Geodesix is a content partnership and licensing platform that actually connects premium publishers with AI developers. Not through one-off deals negotiated in desperation or opportunistic scraping that no one is happy with, but through real infrastructure that makes content partnerships seamless, transparent, and fair.
We believe content is the third pillar of AI infrastructure, alongside compute and energy. And we believe it deserves the same serious treatment.
Geodesix, by impact.com
Geodesix is focused on commerce content, which we consider to be the highest-value segment of the content market. impact.com is the undeniable global leader in commerce partnerships. The world’s largest retailers are clients. The world’s largest and best publishers and creators are partners. No one has more experience making content commerce work at scale.
impact.com has spent over a decade building the world’s leading partnership management platform. The company and its leadership understands and are deeply committed, at a fundamental level, to the idea that sustainable ecosystems require fair value exchange. That tracking and attribution are not just technical problems. They are TRUST problems. That the infrastructure layer matters.
This is not a side project or an experiment. This is impact.com extending its core mission into the AI economy.
The Team
Building something this ambitious requires people who have done it before.
I am thrilled to announce the Geodesix leadership team:
Gilad Tiram is our Chief Technology Officer and will lead or development team. Gilad was my first CTO at Trackonomics and has 20+ years of engineering platform leadership.
Andreas Heiner is our Chief Science Officer. Andreas is a seasoned researcher, Marie Curie Fellow, and former Principal Scientist at Nokia Research. Andreas brings the algorithmic and modelling depth, rigour and expertise which makes us unique. We use science - not hype!
Ken Blom will be joining us as a Strategic Advisor on AI Partnerships. Ken’s experience as Chief Business Officer at BuzzFeed and his previous work in licensing content to LLMs brings us invaluable insight into this new type of dealmaking.
Brad Bowers will serve as an advisor and lead Publisher Partnerships. Brad and I are long-time collaborators, and I’ve seen firsthand how few people understand the commercial realities of publishing as deeply as he does. He brings more than 20 years of experience as a publisher executive and consultant, with a deep focus on revenue strategy and partnerships.
Nilla Ali will be joining us as an Advisor on Creator Partnerships. Previously at Buzzfed, Nilla helped shape the Commerce Content industry and grow it into a veritable juggernaut for publishers, before moving on to focus on the Creator economy. I have worked with her for years, and consider her to be one the brightest and most talented executives in our industry.
David Dowd will lead our Demand-side Partnerships. Former Head of Commerce Media at Hearst, and previously at Tubular Labs, Google, and HootSuite, David is a true expert in Retail Media and Commerce Partnerships, as well as a seasoned enterprise sales executive.
Together, we are building a team that can actually make this market work!
The Breakthrough
The challenge with content licensing is not just technical, or just legal, or just commercial. It is all three, deeply intertwined.
How do you track which content contributes to an AI response? That is a technical problem. How do you structure agreements that work for both publishers and AI companies? That is a commercial problem. How do you ensure rights are properly cleared and compensation flows correctly? That is a legal problem.
You cannot solve one without solving the others. They are facets of the same fundamental challenge: building infrastructure that makes the content-AI relationship sustainable.
At Geodesix, we have been working on all three - simultaneously.
On the technical side, we have built attribution technology that measures semantic contribution: the actual informational value that each piece of content provides to an AI response. This is not keyword matching or simple citation counting. It is a fundamental rethinking of how we measure content’s role in generating answers.
And here is what is remarkable: we believe this same technology solves a problem publishers have struggled with for years. The traditional sales-attribution model for content has always been crude. Last-click attribution ignores all the research, comparison, and decision-shaping that content actually does.
Semantic Contribution Attribution (SCA) could finally give publishers credit for the full value they create. Not just in AI, but in commerce broadly. By splitting commissions based on actual informational contribution, we can create a fairer model for everyone.
We are not just building for the AI economy. We are building infrastructure that could transform how content value is measured, period.
Thank You
None of this would be possible without the publishers and retailers who have shared their data, their challenges, and their insights over the past year. You took meetings when this was just an idea. You answered uncomfortable questions. You trusted us with information that helped us understand what this market actually needs.
We are building this for you. And we are going to get it right.
We’re Hiring!
We are looking for exceptional people to join us.
Solutions Engineer (London, Tel Aviv, or NYC): You will be the primary point of contact for both sides of our marketplace. Deeply technical but energized by client relationships. You will spend mornings debugging MCP connection issues and afternoons walking partners through their analytics dashboard.
Query Quality Scientist (London, Tel Aviv, or NYC): When an LLM queries our platform, the quality of what comes back determines everything. Your job is to make that retrieval as good as it can possibly be. This is genuinely novel work. The MCP protocol is months old. Best practices do not exist yet.
If you want to shape how AI and content creators work together, this is the moment. Reach out!
Join Us
If you believe content deserves fair compensation in the AI economy, if you want to be part of building the infrastructure that makes it possible: join our Beta waiting list.
The future of content in AI is not written yet. Let us write it together.
Hanan Maayan is GM of Geodesix by impact.com. He previously co-founded Trackonomics, which was acquired by impact.com in 2022.