Brands Have Started Showing Ads to AI Agents Instead of Humans
Time showed the first ads for AI agents via the Agent Ads format with Mobian. Wayfair is expanding product attributes for autonomous recommendations. Adobe and Cloudflare have released AI visibility tools.
Automated traffic on the internet is growing nearly eight times faster than human traffic — and companies have begun testing advertising aimed not at people, but at AI agents. These figures were reported in March by cybersecurity firm Human Security.
While consumers are only beginning to entrust purchases and other tasks to agents, brands are already thinking not only about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), but also about direct interaction with agents — to influence sales and how autonomous systems perceive the brand. Top executives at a number of companies told Marketing Brew about this.
"[Agents] are still forming as a channel," said Fiona Tan, CTO of Wayfair. "We want to stay as close as possible to how consumer behavior is changing, react as quickly as possible, and in some cases — provide information proactively."
The Time Precedent
Time magazine was one of the first to turn the idea into practice. According to the publication's COO Mark Howard, the number of days when bot traffic on the site exceeds human traffic is growing. Howard cited data from Ally Bank: consumers who come to a brand via AI recommendations convert more often and are at a later stage of the funnel, making them an attractive audience for advertisers.
Advertising addressed to agents also allows brands to promote accurate product information and reduce the risk of models spreading erroneous facts, Howard explained. To this end, Time, together with the ad-tech platform Mobian, is launching the Agent Ads format — ads that are readable by agents.
The mechanics work as follows. Time redirects the agent to a page in markdown format with metadata and a sponsorship notice. The agent receives brand-verified facts — for example, in Ally's case, the year of founding and the fact that it is a financial company. At the end of the page, the source of the ad's content is indicated, along with a disclaimer marking its conclusion. Only after that does the agent land on the site's regular page.
The ads are shown from Time's "whitelist" — roughly 70 agents and bots that are allowed to scan the site.
"We know that AI agents come to the site, scan the page, and save the information — often to present it now or in the future without returning for a re-scan," Howard says. "The point is to deliver brand facts to that layer of AI knowledge."
Infrastructure Matters More Than Advertising
Influencing agents is not limited to advertising. The key condition is optimizing the site so that the agent comes to the brand's page in the first place. Agentic traffic on Wayfair is still "quite early," Tan admits, but the company is increasing the number of attributes — the parameters sellers use to describe products — to give agents more data for recommendations based on user queries.
In addition, Wayfair is participating in building agentic commerce infrastructure: together with Google, the company is working on the Universal Commerce Protocol, a protocol designed to simplify e-commerce operations.
While some brands are already testing ads for agents, others are still mastering AEO and the fight for visibility on AI platforms. Technology companies continue to release relevant solutions. In June, Adobe unveiled the Adobe Brand Visibility platform for the enterprise segment: it aggregates data, including agent traffic, and helps brands see how models scan their sites and optimize their online presence. In August, Cloudflare released the AEO Visibility Dashboard — a tool showing whether AI assistants recommend a brand's products to consumers, and how exactly.
Source: Marketing Brew; Source: businessinsider.com
More from Сергей Мельник
179 articles
Related articles
- Elvis Presley Song Rights Holders Demand $41.1 Million from Anthropic
- Pinduoduo and Anthropic paid Kazakhstan 8 billion tenge in taxes
- Disney Will Show Super Bowl 2027 Through the Eyes of Star Wars Characters
- Mom's Touch to Open 50 Restaurants in Kazakhstan with Shin-Line
- Prada answered AI slop with a pencil: 6 million views and mice in the style of Disney