(27 Oct 2026) AI tools are an increasingly regular part of how people search for and read scholarly content. As that’s happened, tracking agentic usage in a clear, consistent way has become a top priority for our community. This new update extends our original best practice to cover not just agentic activity on publisher platforms, but in third-party tools too.
As part of this work, we also updated our Best Practice on Syndicated Usage. That means everything should fit together smoothly no matter where users are when they access content – whether that’s a publisher platform, an aggregator site, or a third-party AI tool.
What’s New in Phase Two?
Phase two builds on our initial AI guidelines by introducing Retrieval Metrics. These give us a clearer look at what happens behind the scenes during the early stages of an AI response:
- Total Retrieved Investigations track every time an AI system pulls a snippet or excerpt of content during its initial search. Retrievals are counted even if the excerpt isn’t used in an agent’s response.
- Total Retrieved Requests identifies when those retrievals are by agents with access to the full text of an item.
With phase two published, our attention is turning to updating the COUNTER API and JSON Schema to accommodate AI usage metrics. As mentioned earlier this month, that development work is part-funded by TRACE – a cross-stakeholder initiative involving STM, NISO, COUNTER, and other partners examining the future of trusted retrieval and attribution in AI-mediated scholarly communication, for the benefit of the entire scholarly communications ecosystem.
The press release in full is here.
