If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone.
Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time — even earlier than predicted.
In the latest sign of the bot takeover, Time magazine has begun serving ads specifically aimed at AI agents. As Digiday reports, it’s an effort to adapt to a new reality governed by the tech. Their promise to would-be clients: by optimizing ads for the bots, brands could be made more visible to AI chatbots and show up in more responses.
The publication started stripping down its webpages last month from HTML to markdown — text-only versions, which live in parallel to the user-facing pages — that are easier for AI agents to ingest. Alongside these new pages, the company is using AI to generate agent ads, which are formatted as FAQs that include a brand’s information and messaging, according to Digiday, and are labeled as “sponsored content.”
It’s a bizarre new tack for the online media industry, which has been reeling from a massive drop in traffic. That falloff has largely been attributed to Google stopping users from visiting websites by serving them with often inaccurate AI summaries.
To stay afloat in an industry mired by continuous layoffs, Time is trying to reinvent itself by appealing to advertisers that want sway in the AI era. A striking metric: the publication said it’s seeing more bots crawl its pages than humans on most days. It says several brands, including online banking service Ally Bank and not-for-profit Project Management Institute, have already signed up.
“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person,” Mobian cofounder and CEO Jonah Goodhart told Digiday. “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.”
“The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands,” he added. “We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.”
To Time, it’s part of a broader effort to sell a Generative Engine Optimization — the AI era evolution of the Google-centered Search Engine Optimization industry — product to brands.
It’s an open question whether Time‘s gambit will pay off and make up for lost search traffic. As Digiday points out, it could even backfire if tech platforms like Google were to change the rules by penalizing AI-oriented ad spam or serving markdown pages aimed at bots that differ from what human users see.
In short, there’s no guarantee it will work, but Time is experimenting regardless.
Time chief operating officer Mark Howard told Digiday that “this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here.”
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