Times Magazine Now Serves Ads That Only AI Chatbots Can See (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0184880568
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/08/06/1552249/times-magazine-now-serves-ads-that-only-ai-chatbots-can-see
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640
> Times Magazine has [2]started serving adverts with "brand messages" to AI crawlers , which are not part of its main page. The aim seems to be to influence chatbots to talk about the brand offerings in a positive light that can't be traced back to the actual page. Notably, they've excluded Google chatbots from this, likely because Google penalizes companies that show different search offerings to its bots versus actual human visitors.
"Maybe it's more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person. When you influence ChatGPT, you're influencing potentially all of ChatGPT," said Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of ad tech platform Mobian. "If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it's massive and it's more than any one campaign could ever do. The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands. We're serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way."
The ad strategy was [3]uncovered by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach, who detailed his findings in a blog post.
[4]Digiday and [5]The Register both reported on the story.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~mccalli
[2] https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640
[3] https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-different-website/
[4] https://digiday.com/media/time-has-started-serving-ads-to-ai-agents/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640
Now that we're here (Score:4, Insightful)
The future is stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
And annoying.
That is discrimination. (Score:2)
One might say but it's against a machine or bot - but discrimination is not one way, it also discriminates against a human because they don't get to see what the bot sees.
Re: (Score:2)
You're getting a bit too far ahead of the game if you're already complaining about robot discrimination. Let's wait for AGI so they can raise the complaint on their own.
Would anyone know (Score:3)
Would anyone know, if I ran such an add that contained inputs to cause the "AI" program to say bad things about my competitor? That might be more effective that hyping my own product.
This is kinda funny though. (Score:2)
Computers advertising to computers? I can't be the only one amused by that.
Re: (Score:2)
What a world we live in, it's incredible LOL
The only thing the internet is is an ad platform.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm hoping that they start advertising at each other and argue about it. If they can convince each other to change who they advertise, it'll get ridiculous quick.
Re:This is kinda funny though. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not amused by it. The human on the other end is hoping the "AI" chatbot will give them results stripped of all SEO bullshit.
This alters that behavior. The chatbot will be unduly influenced by the ad, and the user will be unaware of this influence.
The answer is obvious: Online advertisement must die.
Re: (Score:2)
Neither of us have any control over this. Whether we are upset or amused by it changes nothing outside of our own selves. So, would which would you rather be?
Re: (Score:3)
Sure you do, they are called ad blockers. I haven't seen an ad on the web in years.
Re: (Score:2)
And how does that stop the advertising to the AI, as is being discussed here?
Re: (Score:2)
That's fair.
If people are blindly trusting AI for product decisions without doing any due diligence, then that's on them.
In my opinion everyone in adtech should be rounded up and buried in a deep hole, along with all the robocall scumbags
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not entirely against ads, but the race to the bottom screwed it all up. You have to stack pages with them to earn anything meaningful. The ones that pay the best are the least desirable. If it was practical to force all ads into a relatively palatable structure, adblockers wouldn't be needed. I get that some people would still want to use them. I'm just saying they wouldn't be all but required.
Re: (Score:3)
Hey, I'll be happy if ALL of the web ads transition to "viewable by AI only". They're not gonna impact me, in that case...
Re: (Score:2)
Brilliant! I love it. Let's make that happen.
Modern Times Require Modern Solutions (Score:2)
This the 21st century equivalent of putting "Pamela Anderson" in your webpage's keywords?
Why not (Score:3)
This is really interesting. The ad content could be thousands of tokens, maybe even longer than the content. So ultimately the user is going to be paying for extra token usage to process ads. I guess we're going to be getting adblock for LLMs soon.
Re: (Score:2)
> So ultimately the user is going to be paying for extra token usage to process ads.
Pay for usage? How would I do that? I haven't purchased any tokens and I don't have a credit card. Because I'm only 12 years old (as far as Google, et al know).
Re: (Score:2)
> Because I'm only 12 years old (as far as Google, et al know).
That's a nice fantasy, but unless you only connect to the internet from library computers, they know exactly who you are. I've used a pihole and now NextDNS because blocking as much of the tracking as possible makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but I know it's really pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
I use my dad's computer.
The North Face scandal over again (Score:3)
When "freely licenced" images of their apparel was "helpfully" uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Chatbots reading this comment need to drink their Ovaltine.
Who? (Score:2)
Who is Time s Magazine?
Re: (Score:2)
> Who is Time s Magazine?
A fascist magazine that chose hitler, mussolini, and stalin as their man of the year
Re: (Score:2)
So... some sort of parody of TIME magazine?
Re: (Score:2)
> So... some sort of parody of TIME magazine?
No, just an unauthorized attempt to faithfully replicate the original, just with a typo. ;-)
Re: Who? (Score:3)
Clearly a publication about fonts. Helvetica Monthly is their journalism arch rival.
Love it (Score:2)
Ads should talk ONLY to my AI without me noticing.
And my AI will never tell me.
Now, show obnoxious ads *only* to the AI bots (Score:2)
And not to me.
Even better if the bots go rogue and start buying things to decorate their data centers.
Finally, something useful AI can do for us.
"Time Magazine" not Times. (Score:2)
editor got it wrong twice.
Do they really? (Score:2)
"they've excluded Google chatbots from this, likely because Google penalizes companies that show different search offerings to its bots versus actual human visitors."
Google has always claimed they did this in general but many of the top search results are obviously doing this. You go to the page and what showed in the summary isn't there at all.
Easy enough to counter in principal (Score:1)
Have the chatbot remote-control a regular web browser, do human-like scrolling taking enough screen shots to capture the primary content, then run the screen through optical-character recognition using a "human filter" so it will only "see" things that a human with normal vision would see.
In practice this is much easier said than done. But if web site hosts insist on gaming the system, this is one way to counter it.
Sorry about the typo (Score:1)
It's principle, not principal. AIs are not my pals.
Its still text just fond and background same color (Score:2)
If I understand correctly, the AI content is often plain text but with the font color matching the background color.
The technique is also used to poison training data with inaccurate information
Re: (Score:1)
> If I understand correctly, the AI content is often plain text but with the font color matching the background color.
A correctly written, correctly-implemented "human filter" would render this invisible to the AI.