At the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Bruell reports that big publishers are considering blocking Google’s web crawler. As Google traffic dwindles thanks to AI overviews, publishers see the longtime bargain of indexing for eyeballs falling out of balance. This is the slow-motion arrival of the “Google Zero” scenario that publishers have been preparing for.
A bit at the end caught my eye, though. If the bots are sending fewer people to the sites, perhaps the new business model is to advertise to agents rather than humans.
Meanwhile, Time is helping advertisers get their messages in front of bots, using a sort of Trojan horse approach—creating text-based ads that regular readers never see but that AI crawlers might find. The hope is that Google’s AI Overviews and other chatbots that hoover up editorial content might reference information from that material when responding to user queries. That, in turn, could help brands reach potential customers.
“There are now two audiences,” said Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer. “We’re thinking about, How do we superserve the humans when they do come, and how do we think about the bots as a secondary audience?”
That goes a degree beyond the SEO-for-AI discussion of the last couple of years. It frames agents and robots as a distinct audience, valuable because they’re proxies for the human customers who no longer show up.
The Time approach of slipping bot-only content into web pages is a mild step in that direction, but it presages the likely future of designing entire alternative interfaces for agents who research, buy, and act on behalf of the real customer. Once we start delivering purpose-built interfaces for agents (structured feeds, MCP-style endpoints, agentic commerce protocols), smuggling text into HTML will look like the AI era’s equivalent of white-text keyword stuffing of SEO’s early days.
Today’s existential publishing challenge: treat AI as a whack-a-mole enemy, or adapt the business model to welcome this new kind of customer?
