Time started showing ads to AI agents and earning money from bot traffic

Time media company has taken a step toward a new kind of economic reality – the publisher has started serving ads meant not for humans, but for AI agents. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute are among its first clients.

It all started a month ago, when Time began converting its webpages from HTML into markdown format. These are stripped-down, text-only copies of each page that drop the design and images, making them far easier for AI systems and agents to read.

The easier it is for AI to access content, the better the odds it shows up in generative search results. Whether markdown pages can actually hold back the decline in search traffic remains an open question, though.

Putting ads on those pages became a way to squeeze revenue out of growing bot traffic while waiting for that answer. To pull this off, Time is working with AI-powered ad platform Mobian, which handles both the page conversion and the ad generation itself.

The ads built for AI agents are formatted as FAQ blocks containing brand information and messaging, labeled as sponsored content. Time and Mobian claim this marks the first time in the industry that a publisher has deliberately served ads targeting AI agents specifically.

Time sales team is pitching brands that have already converted their own corporate sites into markdown format. These are the companies already thinking hardest about how to reach AI bots.

According to Mobian, about 15% of brands are already running their own markdown pages, and as bets on a two-track internet keep growing, that number is only expected to climb.

The scheme runs on a chain of influence – an AI agent reads the ad block containing brand information, indexes that data, then draws on it when generating answers for users. That gives brands a kind of indirect control over what something like ChatGPT tells millions of people about them.

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.

– Mobian co-founder and CEO Jonah Goodhart

The big idea here, he said, is that LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands, and Mobian is serving that up in a very straightforward, easy way.