TIME has started serving advertisements designed for AI crawlers in Markdown versions of some of its pages. A regular visitor sees the familiar HTML version, while selected crawlers may receive a text-only version containing sponsored FAQ-style content.
How does it work?
According to Digiday and The Register, TIME is working with advertising technology company Mobian. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute are among the first advertisers. The blocks contain questions and answers written in a format that AI systems can easily extract as brand information.
This is not yet proof that ChatGPT has changed its answers
It is important to be precise: there is no evidence that this content has already changed the answers of ChatGPT or other models, and it should not automatically be described as training data. It is primarily content targeted at AI crawlers and answer-search systems.
The next stage of GEO?
The broader development is the emergence of a new advertising market. Brands are trying to influence not only what people see, but also the context from which AI systems build their answers.
That may create a new revenue stream for publishers, but it also raises questions about trust, disclosure and cloaking: what happens when different types of crawlers receive different versions of the same page?
The competition for digital visibility is expanding from traditional SEO into GEO — while the rules are still being written.
Sources: Digiday; The Register.