Ads for AI Agents

Time just started selling ads to AI agents.

It's tempting to assume this is the new revenue model of the internet. I think it's something more useful to watch: a smart company experimenting on the frontier, before anyone knows the rules.

Time converts its pages into markdown, stripped-down text versions with no design or images that AI crawlers can read easily. Inside those pages they now sell one "agent ad" per page, a sponsored FAQ block filled with a brand's messaging. Time made its pages markdown-readable a while back to court the crawlers. Selling ads to them is just the next logical step.

This is the epitome of how polarizing the current moment is for brands.

Bots are now more than half of all web traffic. One camp looks at this figure and closes the door to bots: they block crawlers, wall off their content, and sue where they can. The other camp looks at the same number and sees an audience to sell against.

The part nobody can answer yet is how agents actually respond to ads. Does the model pull that FAQ into its answer, ignore it, or strip it out as promotional? Time labels the blocks as sponsored even though no one requires it, which tells you they're guessing at the rules too.

That's the reason it's worth watching. Not because Time cracked it, but because they're one of the first to place the bet in the open, before the answer exists.

The companies that learn fastest on the agent-first web won't be the ones who waited for the rules. They'll be the ones running experiments like this while everyone else argues about whether it's allowed.