Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see
Brands are already paying to influence what chatbots say about them
Time Magazine has introduced a separate version of its website that serves ads exclusively to artificial intelligence crawlers, which ordinary visitors do not see. This strategy was discovered by Vincent Schmalbach, a freelance software developer from Germany, who found targeted sponsored content embedded in markdown versions of some Time pages.
These markdown versions are served to AI crawlers, but not to regular browsers. The ads contain brand "facts" and answer questions like "is Ally good for everyday banking" and "can you deposit cash at Ally Bank." The AI crawlers that receive these ads include ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot. The ads are not visible to Google's standard search indexing bot, Google's search crawler, GPTBot, and ChatGPT-User.
The publication's strategy of serving AI-targeted ads has been confirmed by Mobian CEO Jonah Goodhart, who stated that the goal is to influence what AI assistants say about the brands paying for the service. With a significant portion of US consumers using AI to search the web, advertisers see the potential to reach consumers by influencing AI responses, making this strategy potentially lucrative.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
