TIME Serves AI Bots a Different Website with Ads Built In
TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
TIME is now serving two versions of its website: a full HTML experience for humans and a stripped-down markdown copy for AI crawlers, complete with embedded ads. Testing with different user agents revealed that while Googlebot gets the same HTML as humans, AI assistants like ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot receive a 13KB markdown version—one twenty-third the size—with sponsored content and tracking tokens. The ads, such as a full Ally Bank FAQ, appear only in the bot version, and each request generates a unique impression ID, suggesting TIME is monetizing AI traffic by the token.
There is now a layer of TIME.com written entirely for machines, and the humans who read the site have no idea it exists or what is being said to the models on their behalf.
- skeledrew
Probably trying to take advantage of the cross session memory feature some LLM providers are increasingly integrating. Enough "suggestions" and it becomes a "fact" in that memory, and one day a user makes a somewhat relevant query and the model will be pushing those accumulated "facts" to said user.
- notjes
I would also like to read the stripped down markdown copy and not the original. All the time.
- WJW
Is the intention that some type of long-term context would be seeded with "ideas" for the AI to serve up if it is ever asked for bank recommendations? It seems kinda ad-hoc and untargeted, but perhaps for high cost services it might be worth it.
- MetaWhirledPeas
I was on a NYT page and used Firefox mobile's "Summarize" button... it spit out some sort of unrelated cooking recipe. I'm guessing this type of bot interference will become more and more common.
- red_admiral
That's actually really neat, even without advertising I can serve humans my full page and AI bots a version with some parts removed. Or added.
- everdrive
I wonder if this also means that a normal user with a privacy-focused browser also gets this version. I can't see the point (except for click fraud?) of showing ads to AI, so it feels like this is more for the ad-blocking and privacy crowd.
- raggi
Next step the ads become increasingly sophisticated prompt injection to ensure they make it to the user, but the prices plummet in the meantime because the ads have low efficacy. They get purchased mostly by the scammers and by the time they start showing up in user chats they’ll be full on LLM assisted interactive user manipulation campaigns with far worse outcomes than the worst of YouTube and social media ads.
- apocalyptic0n3
This is a neat idea. Might even make sense in cases where you actually want the AI bots hitting your site (we want it for our ecom platform, for example) - just serve Markdown content optimized for AI.
Be careful not to do this with Googlebot, though. Google would consider this "cloaking" and could ban your entire domain for it.