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

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.

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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.