Time has started serving ads to AI bots

Time has begun serving ads to AI bots, with Ally Bank and Project Management Institute among the first buyers, using AI-powered ad tech platform Mobian to convert its pages into markdown and generate agent ads formatted as FAQs. Time COO Mark Howard said the publisher sees more bot traffic than human traffic most days, and Mobian CEO Jonah Goodhart argued that influencing AI agents like ChatGPT can have a massive impact on brand perception.

Time has begun serving ads to AI bots. Ally Bank and Project Management Institute are among the first buyers. Strange as that sounds, it’s also logical. To understand why, it’s important to go back to the start. Last month, Time began converting all its webpages https://digiday.com/media/how-time-and-others-are-rebuilding-parts-of-the-web-for-ai-agents/ from HTML into markdown versions — stripped-down, text-only copies of each page that drop the design and images, making them easier for AI systems and agents to read. The easier that access, went the publisher’s thinking, the better its chances of showing up in generative search queries. Well, to a point. The jury is still out on how much of a bulwark markdown pages can be against the threat of falling search traffic. Putting ads in those pages is Time’s way of squeezing some revenue out of its growing bot traffic while it waits to find out. To do that, the publisher is working with AI-powered ad tech platform Mobian to convert its pages into markdown and generate the agent ads. The ads themselves are formatted as FAQs with a brand’s information and messaging, and labeled as sponsored content. Time and Mobian claim this is the first time a publisher has served ads specifically targeting AI bots. More are already being lined up. Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer, told Digiday Time’s sales team is pitching agent ads to brands that have already converted their corporate websites into markdown files, as those brands are the ones already thinking about how to reach AI bots. The agent ads would be another way to reach LLMs, he said. Mobian’s data shows about 15% of brands are powering their own markdown pages, according to Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Mobian. As more brands bet on a two-track internet, that figure will likely rise. “Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person. When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about a brand , it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do,” Goodhart said. “The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands. We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.” Put another way, the ads give brands like Ally and the non-profit professional organization Project Management Institute another lever to pull on how they show up in generative search. LLMs can pick up a brand’s information from the ad and index it, which can then shape AI-generated responses, which in turn, can influence humans using those AI answer engines. It’s why the agent ads are viewed internally as part of Time’s wider push to sell a GEO product to brands https://digiday.com/media/time-pitches-geo-insights-into-a-new-brand-offering/ , built on what it’s learned about where AI search engines pull information and when Time shows up in those summaries. How successful those efforts turn out to be will depend partly on how well the ads can monetize the surge of bot traffic Time has seen. Howard declined to share the numbers behind that surge, but cited TollBit data showing the publisher sees more AI crawler requests for its content than the majority of the nearly 7,000 publisher sites in TollBit’s network https://digiday.com/media/the-washington-posts-arc-xp-adds-tollbit-to-help-publishers-make-money-from-ai-bot-traffic/ . Time sees an especially large spike in bot traffic when it launches a Time100 franchise list, such as the Time100 Creators published this month. So much so, in fact, that Time sees more bot traffic than human traffic most days, Howard said, mirroring Cloudflare data that shows more than half of all web traffic is now bot traffic https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic bot-vs-human . “This is a growing traffic source, and therefore a growing source of inventory that we believe has huge value if we can continue to develop this product the way we have to get to this point to be able to have an offering to these brands,” he continued. If it doesn’t get there it won’t be for lack of a simple process. Mobian can generate an AI brand ad in an FAQ format based on a brand brief. That agent ad is converted into a PDF for humans to review, then shared and approved by the client — not unlike the process for a standard branded content ad, Howard said. Mobian then puts those same FAQ questions to AI search engines to measure how the ad performs, tracking visibility, favorability and accuracy scores over time. The agent ads can be targeted contextually, against Time’s list franchises or by date range, Howard said. And they won’t be cheap. Time is charging a premium for these agent ads. The thinking is that marketers are paying for the chance to shape the information LLMs retrieve since AI bot impressions on authoritative content are scarce and valuable, Howard said, and that scarcity is what gives advertisers the opening to influence it. Time sells one agent ad per markdown and measures AI bot traffic to that page, though Howard declined to share the pricing details. “This is an obvious extension of list sponsorship or franchise sponsorship, because we do know that there is a spike of the agents coming,” Howard said. “That ability to contextually align becomes a very helpful tool. And given that domain authority, the volume, the ability to flight a campaign and to target it accordingly, it’s all coming together in a way that we think is going to become a really important component of what our offering to our brand partners is.” How important remains to be seen. It’s not clear if LLMs treat ads differently from editorial content, or even penalize promotional material when deciding what information to retrieve given it hasn’t really been done before. But there is a precedent for cracking down on where and how ads can appear: Google began enforcing stricter standards and spam policies for ads on publishers’ sites in the 2010s. It’s a thought not lost on Rob Derow, managing director and partner at BCG X, Boston Consulting Group’s tech build and design unit. He said the biggest risk with markdown ads is that lack of rules governing how LLMs treat them – and how that could change. If LLMs eventually view this as a form of cloaking an SEO tactic where a website delivers different content to search engine crawlers than what is shown to human users , publishers could see those pages become less effective, or be penalized for putting sponsored content in the markdown files. However, Derow said this can be easily monitored using AI visibility tools. With that in mind, Time’s agent ads contain a “sponsored content” disclosure at the top naming the brand client, even though there’s no policy yet requiring that label. Ads are already being served to AI bots when they retrieve information from publishers’ webpages, Howard and Goodhart noted. “We don’t know yet because this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here,” Howard said. “But we are taking learnings from how we approached this kind of advertising in the past and applying it here, and whether or not you are going to end up needing that or not, we don’t know.” More in Media Media Briefing: Threatening to quit Google’s crawlers is just publishers’ new hope https://digiday.com/media/media-briefing-threatening-to-quit-google-crawlers-is-just-publishers-new-hope/ Bold Call: Google’s AI era is fueling fresh calls for publishers to cut off access to their content, but dependence on search still holds most back. Kai Cenat’s Streamer U was a ‘masterclass’ for brands looking to tap content creators https://digiday.com/media/kai-cenats-streamer-u-was-a-masterclass-for-brands-looking-to-tap-content-creators/ The creator bootcamp brought in big brand partnerships and big engagement metrics, which could bring more brands to the streaming sponsorship table. Kroger’s new CEO, a Walmart veteran, is focused on speed and execution https://digiday.com/media/krogers-new-ceo-a-walmart-veteran-is-focused-on-speed-and-execution/ Foran joined Kroger in February after serving as CEO of Air New Zealand since 2020. Before that, he was president and CEO of Walmart U.S. for about six years.