Time Magazine deploys AI ads targeting crawlers as bot traffic overtakes human visits

Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see

AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm's boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content. We only have one documented example so far, and that's Time serving AI-only ads to selected AI crawlers, as spotted by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach. In a Wednesday blog post, Schmalbach detailed how he found sponsored content embedded in markdown versions of some Time pages that are served to AI crawlers but not ordinary browsers. Those pages also contained advertising tags from adtech vendor Mobian ahead of extensive FAQs for online-only bank Ally. The FAQs include brand "facts," such as the number of fee-free ATMs associated with the branchless bank, alongside claims that Ally is "the only bank built for life today," putting it in "a category of one." Key "brand fact" statements that make for great regurgitable facts are also included in the AI-only advertisement, as are answers to questions like "is Ally good for everyday banking," "can you deposit cash at Ally Bank," and the like. The FAQ is flagged as sponsored content on the markdown page, but it doesn't change the fact that the entire thing is written like it was designed to be spit back out by a chatbot in response to specific questions. Not all web crawlers are getting these markdown ads either. Per Schmalbach, Google's standard search indexing bot doesn't see the ads, as it just gets the same HTML that a human gets. "Only the [chatbot] assistant crawlers get the forked version," he wrote. That means user-agents including ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot receive the sponsored markdown, while Google's standard search crawler gets the same HTML served to ordinary browsers. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, which OpenAI uses for model training and user-initiated retrieval respectively, return HTTP 406 errors in Schmalbach's tests, while OAI-SearchBot receives the markdown version used to support ChatGPT Search. These AI ad-infused markdown versions of stories should be viewable by humans who change the User-Agent header sent as part of HTTP requests, which is how Schmalbach said he spotted them. The Register tested several articles from Time to see for ourselves, and we were able to replicate the results using the crawler simulator provided by search engine optimization firm Encited. When viewed as ClaudeBot, Time's Best Inventions of 2025 list includes the Ally Bank ad, as do stories about Time's top content creators of 2026, as does a gallery of photos from a creators' party held in New York recently to honor the list. The markdown ads don't appear on newsier stories that we checked, suggesting the ads may be part of more evergreen content rather than articles with a shorter shelf life. As Schmalbach points out in his writeup, this could be "the first clear look at what the web starts to become when the main audience is AI models," which is a threshold we've already crossed. Why advertise to humans when you can make AI do it for you? It's not clear whether Time's strategy of advertising to AI crawlers has been adopted by other publishers, but it'd be a shock if others weren't at least considering it. As noted above, AI crawler traffic has already begun to surpass human visits to webpages, making it potentially more lucrative for advertisers to target those crawlers than the humans who made them. With half of the US consumers surveyed saying they use AI to search the web, the potential to reach consumers by influencing AI responses is incredibly powerful, and that is what Time and its advertising partner Mobian appear to be banking on. When we asked the publication to verify Schmalbach's report and the results we found, they didn't answer questions, instead pointing us to a story in media and marketing outlet Digiday from last week that verified not only what we saw but our fears about the scheme, too. Per Digiday, Time started converting its web pages to markdown in order to make them more appealing to AI crawlers in June, and a partnership with Mobian was included in that rework. Time COO Mark Howard told Digiday that the publication's sales team is pitching agent ads to brands that have also converted their websites to markdown, as it suggests those brands are thinking about reaching AI bots. It's a quote from Mobian CEO and co-founder Jonah Goodhart that makes the objective clear, however: The company's aim is to shape what AI assistants say about the brands paying for the service. "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 told Digiday. "With a human you influence one person." So far, the pair confirmed to Digiday that Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute were the first brands trying to influence AI search results, matching the ads Schmalbach and The Register found in AI crawler versions of Time's pages. Time and Mobian told Digiday that the partnership marks the first time a publisher has served ads directly targeting AI crawlers, but that "more are already being lined up." In other words, you soon may not be able to tell which results in an AI powered search are legitimately being surfaced because of being good products, and which are just gaming the system. It's the early days of the SEO race all over again, only this time fooling the indexers is as easy as handing any old idiot the same pamphlet over and over again until its content becomes truth. ®

Time Magazine Now Running Ads Meant Specifically to Influence AI Agents

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech 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."

TIME.com is no longer just for humans: there's a secret version only machines can see, and it's a very good idea

It serves AI bots Markdown pages packed with sponsored content TIME.com has developed a very interesting strategy in response to bot traffic to its website. As Vincent Schmalbach details, the magazine serves one page to human visitors and a long block of Markdown text to artificial intelligence bots. The key to it all? Advertising. A page created for machines While, as humans and browsers, TIME serves us the original page, the one we see, making the same request as ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or OAI-SearchBot returns plain text in Markdown format. And the move is key now that automated traffic is growing quickly. The headers of the documents received by the AI point to Mobian, an advertising company, and include a per-request identifier and the number of tokens delivered. As for the content, sponsored content from Ally Bank or Project Management Institute appears, written as the usual questions and answers that assistants tend to favor. With this strategy each visit from an AI bot can become an advertising impression and monetized. The web speaks to two audiences On Time.com, the ads are labeled as sponsored in the Markdown and are completely invisible, since they aren't even delivered to visitors. While the web is also starting to be designed for AI readers and while ChatGPT tests ad formats, many publications are suffering from declining traffic to their sites. That's especially true for human visits, because if we can monetize bot visits, the landscape could change dramatically. In this case, though there's more, TIME shows us an interesting response to a rapidly changing internet where machines read more pages than we do.