Times Magazine Now Serves Ads That Only AI Chatbots Can See
Longtime Slashdot reader mccalli writes: Times Magazine has started serving adverts with "brand messages" to AI crawlers, which are not part of its main page. The aim seems to be to influence chatbots to talk about the brand offerings in a positive light that can't be traced back to the actual page. Notably, they've excluded Google chatbots from this, likely because Google penalizes companies…
Times Magazine has begun serving advertisements specifically designed for AI chatbots, rather than being visible to human visitors. The objective appears to be to shape the way chatbots discuss brand offerings in a positive manner, in a manner that remains concealed from the site's regular audience. Notably, they have deliberately excluded Google's chatbots from this practice, presumably due to Google's policy against serving different search results to bots compared to human users.
According to Jonah Goodhart, the co-founder and CEO of ad technology firm Mobian, "It might be more crucial to affect the agent than even the human, as interacting with ChatGPT could potentially influence all of its users." Goodhart emphasized the significant impact of altering ChatGPT's responses to a brand, stating that it holds more weight than any single campaign.
The concept behind this strategy lies in providing trusted information about brands to large language models (LLMs) and AI, thereby facilitating more straightforward interaction. This approach was first uncovered by German freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach, who shared his findings in a blog post. Subsequent reports on the subject were published by Digiday and The Register.
Written by urgent.news from Slashdot's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
