Time starts selling ads directly to AI agents

Time began converting its webpages from HTML to markdown—stripped-down, text-only versions that remove design and images—to make content easier for AI systems to read. The markdown conversion aims to improve Time's visibility in generative search results. However, as the publisher waited to assess how much protection markdown pages offer against lost search traffic, it recognized an unexpected opportunity: the markdown format also made it simpler to embed ads targeted specifically at AI agents. Working with Mobian, an AI-powered ad tech platform, Time created a new ad format in which brands can pay a premium to have their messaging appear as FAQ-formatted sponsored content in those markdown pages. Time's COO Mark Howard told Digiday that the sales team is pitching agent ads to brands that have already converted their own corporate websites to markdown—companies already thinking about reaching AI systems. Ally Bank and Project Management Institute became early adopters. Mobian's co-founder and CEO Jonah Goodhart emphasized the strategic value: when an LLM indexes brand information from these ads, it shapes what the AI tells humans in future conversations. As he put it, "When you influence ChatGPT, you're influencing potentially all of ChatGPT." Time's bot traffic has surged dramatically. Howard declined to share exact numbers but cited TollBit data showing Time receives more AI crawler requests than the majority of nearly 7,000 publisher sites in that network. Time sees especially large spikes in bot traffic when launching major franchises like Time100 Creators, published this month. Most days, Time now sees more bot traffic than human traffic—a pattern mirrored in Cloudflare data showing more than half of all web traffic is bot traffic. The agent ad process is straightforward: Mobian generates an FAQ-formatted ad from a brand brief, converts it to PDF for human review, then seeks client approval using a process similar to standard branded content advertising. Mobian then tests the ad by querying AI search engines with the FAQ questions, tracking visibility, favorability, and accuracy scores over time. Ads can be targeted contextually against Time's franchise lists or by date range. Time charges a premium, treating scarce, authoritative bot impressions as high-value inventory. Pricing details remain undisclosed. The long-term viability is uncertain. It is not yet clear whether LLMs treat ads differently from editorial content or penalize promotional material, since this has not been done before. Rob Derow, managing director at BCG X, flagged the biggest risk: the lack of rules governing how LLMs treat markdown ads, and the possibility that policies could change. If LLMs eventually view this as "cloaking" (an SEO tactic of serving different content to bots than humans), publishers could face penalties or reduced effectiveness. To mitigate that risk, Time has voluntarily added a "sponsored content" disclosure at the top of agent ads, even though no policy yet requires such a label. Howard acknowledged the uncertainty: "We don't know yet because this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here."