That response doesn’t really make sense to me because a person using a search engine is searching for something.

To the extent they are looking for news, they just already know about it so it suggests they are looking for further reading. You wouldn’t search for headlines about something you already know of surely?

If they don’t click through it must not have been of interest?

It seems to me that if they were going to have to pay for the item merely being listed, irrespective of if someone interacted with it, then if I was google I simply wouldn’t show that content in search results either.

Now if google was summarising the content beyond just the headline - I would agree with you. They should pay because they are taking the content and summarising it so a person wouldnt need to read it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case?

Facebook and reddit is a little different because unlike google there is an interactive forum. So the comments usually do summarise the content.