The spots are FAQ-style sponsored blocks, one to a text-only page, sold at a premium — and no one yet knows how the models handle sponsored text.

Time has begun serving advertisements to AI agents, with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute among the earliest customers. Time and Mobian, the AI-run ad tech platform it built the product with, say no publisher before them has run advertising made specifically for AI agents.

The ads ride on a conversion the publisher began last month, moving every page on its site out of HTML and into markdown — pared-back copies that carry only text, with layout and pictures stripped out. The reasoning was that pages AI systems and agents can parse more easily give Time a better chance of turning up in the results returned for generative search queries. Each agent ad is written as an FAQ laying out the particulars and messages a brand wants conveyed, and it is flagged to readers as sponsorship.

On the majority of days, bots outnumber people among Time's visitors, chief operating officer Mark Howard told Digiday — a pattern matching Cloudflare figures that put bots at more than half of everything moving across the web. Howard declined to share the specific numbers behind Time's surge in AI bot traffic, and pointed instead to TollBit data indicating that AI crawlers request Time's content more often than they do for most of the nearly 7,000 publisher sites TollBit counts in its network.

Bot traffic climbs particularly sharply whenever a new Time100 franchise list goes live, among them the Time100 Creators list published this month. Buyers can aim the agent ads by context, against the franchise lists, or across a span of dates, Howard said. The publisher counts the AI bot visits each ad's page draws.

Howard said Time's sellers are taking the agent ads to companies that have already shifted their own business sites over to markdown, on the reasoning that those advertisers have begun thinking about how to get in front of AI bots. Jonah Goodhart, who co-founded Mobian and is its CEO, said the company's figures indicate about 15% of brands run markdown pages of their own.

Time is charging a premium for the placements, and Howard declined to share pricing details. What advertisers are buying, he said, is scarcity: impressions from AI bots set against trusted content are rare and worth a lot, and that rarity is what gives a brand its opening to mould what large language models pull in.

Whether that shaping lands is unsettled: nobody knows whether large language models handle advertising and editorial in separate ways, or whether promotional copy gets marked down as they choose what information to pull, since nothing quite like this has been attempted to date. Curbs on where ads may run and what form they take do have precedent — during the 2010s, Google began holding advertising carried on publishers' sites to tougher standards and spam rules.

Rob Derow, a managing director and partner at BCG X, Boston Consulting Group's technology build and design arm, told Digiday that the greatest danger with markdown ads sits in that absence of rules, because it could change. Should the models come to read sponsored markdown as cloaking — a site serving crawlers one thing and people another — the pages might work less well for publishers, he said, or publishers might be punished for placing sponsorship inside their markdown files.

Time labels the ads anyway: every agent ad opens with a disclosure naming the brand client and identifying the item as sponsored content — a label no policy so far requires it to carry.