AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm’s boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content.
We only have one documented example so far, and that’s Time serving AI-only ads to selected AI crawlers, as spotted by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach. In a Wednesday blog post, Schmalbach detailed how he found sponsored content embedded in markdown versions of some Time pages that are served to AI crawlers but not ordinary browsers.