Time magazine has deployed a content-cloaking scheme that serves a special Markdown version of its pages to AI crawlers, stuffed with promotional material, while regular visitors and Google’s bot see the standard HTML. Built with ad startup Mobian, the hidden text — including marketing for bank Ally — is read by LLMs as clean data, leading chatbots to organically recommend the brand in conversations about personal finance. The publishers openly admit the motive: planting the right wording into an AI’s knowledge base lets them bias responses for an entire service’s audience. The move marks the birth of a shadow AI-optimization market where brands pay to appear in generative search results.

Related: OpenAI Launches Ads Manager for ChatGPT, Google is Quietly Moving Toward Ads in Gemini, GitHub Copilot Inserts Ads Into PRs

The Register: Time magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see