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 an innovative approach to serving advertisements exclusively to Artificial Intelligence crawlers, which are generally not served the same content that ordinary users encounter. This strategy was uncovered by software developer Vincent Schmalbach, who noticed AI-only ads embedded in markdown versions of some Time pages served to AI crawlers but not to standard browsers.
The ads, which contain brand facts and answers to frequently asked questions, are aimed at influencing the responses of chatbots like Claude, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot. These AI crawlers are increasingly surpassing human visitors in terms of webpage traffic, making them a potentially lucrative target for advertisers. Google's standard search indexing bot does not receive these ads, but other AI crawler bots do.
The ads are designed to mimic human-targeted content, allowing them to be ingested by chatbots and influence their responses. Time's COO and Mobian CEO have confirmed that this is the first instance of a publisher serving ads specifically targeted at AI crawlers, hinting at a growing trend in the advertising industry. The implications of this development suggest that AI could significantly impact search results, blurring the lines between genuine product representation and manipulated results.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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