TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
Which summary reads better? Pick one — models revealed after.Both summaries are AI-generated.
TIME is now serving AI crawlers a 13KB markdown version of articles with baked-in ads (vs. 303KB HTML for humans), logging each bot fetch as a billable ad impression via UUIDs and no-cache headers. This means every LLM training or retrieval call to TIME’s content silently inflates your token costs by ~3,300 tokens per request and injects sponsor FAQs into your context, risking biased or off-topic outputs if you don’t scrub them.
TIME serves AI bots a stripped-down markdown version of its content—23x smaller than human-facing HTML—with ads embedded as sponsored FAQs structured for model consumption, while blocking some AI agents entirely. This means your production agents may ingest paid promotional content disguised as factual answers, potentially skewing outputs unless you explicitly filter or flag these sponsored sections.