The next ad market may be built for machines

‘Time’ magazine’s ads for bots offer publishers new revenue while raising questions about disclosure and AI influence. For publishers who make their money through advertising, it’s difficult to see bots as anything other than a threat. They crawl their content, chop it up into machine readable code, and then serve up the information as context in AI summaries, usually without leaving so much as a dime in the tip jar. With bot activity surging as human referral traffic plummets, it’s no wonder that many publisher sites block as many bots as possible.