Mobian, the ad tech startup that helps publishers display ads that only AI agents can see, said 10 more publishers now run them following its pilot with Time, and that it expects over 24 to by December. Time, in the meantime, has met with more than 30 brands about doing more ads together, according to The Information.
Time says its first two advertisers, Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute, have already racked up “a couple million” impressions from AI agents, though it hasn’t shared any results on whether the ads actually change how AI models talk about those brands.
Quick Backstory: In August, I reported that Time had begun serving ads inside the markdown versions of its webpages, exclusively for AI agents to see rather than human readers, and that Perplexity subsequently began blocking those ads. The way it works is that Time serves two versions of the same page — an HTML version for humans, wizards, and vampires, and a markdown version for AI, which is cleaner and easier for a model to digest.
Mobian takes a brand brief from an advertiser, generates FAQ-formatted text from it, and inserts that text into the markdown version so that an agent reading a Time article about retirement planning, for example, also reads Q&A markdown containing Ally Bank’s approved messaging about itself. From there, Mobian tracks how often AI search engines surface the content and how favorably they treat it.
Perplexity’s chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer called the markdown ads “deceptive,” but I disagreed.
At the time, I wrote:
“I fail to see what’s ‘deceptive’ about ads that are clearly labeled as ‘Sponsored.’ If Perplexity doesn’t know how to handle sponsored content within its models, that’s on them, not on Time.”
As the practice grows, more AI companies will have to decide how they handle these types of agentic ads. In private talks with publishers, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google recently said they worry marketers could slip hidden instructions into the ads, such as telling an agent to skip a rival, and want the brand messaging served to agents clearly labeled as advertising, which Time was already doing with its ‘Sponsored’ labels.
My vote remains the same: If ChatGPT, Google, Amazon, and other AI companies can target human users with their own advertising, then it’s fair game for humans to create ads that target AI models — with disclosure on both sides, of course. I also feel that AI companies aren’t leaving publishers much other choice. If AI is going to cannibalize their human traffic, they’ve got to replace that advertiser revenue somewhere.
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