Time and ad tech company Mobian began testing ads built for AI agents in the summer of 2026, with Ally Bank and Project Management Institute among the first advertisers. When an agent requests a Time article, it can receive a machine-readable version of the page — markdown or streamlined HTML, depending on what the agent asks for — carrying the unchanged editorial text plus one labeled sponsored block. Instead of a banner, slogan or video, that block holds structured company facts, data and FAQs the advertiser approved.
Time is selling those impressions on a CPM basis where the impression is a bot. Chief operating officer Mark Howard said the rate runs roughly five to seven times Time’s average display cost per order, on the argument that a single agent impression may shape recommendations further down the line. Project Management Institute paid nothing incremental, its test folded into an existing publisher relationship, and CMO Menaka Gopinath described the work as AEO rather than advertising: optimizing discovery so the models find PMI in the right places.
Expedia has gone past buying. It created a business-to-agent function, led by head of organic and agentic search Daniel Kang and staffed largely with technical employees who build their own agents to study how other agents evaluate Expedia’s content. Chief marketing officer Jochen Koedijk calls it a parallel marketing capability requiring “focused, single-threaded leadership — a person who goes to bed thinking about it and wakes up thinking about it.” In May, under 1.5% of Expedia’s traffic arrived through AI agents and AEO.
Perplexity called Time’s markdown ads deceptive, moved to keep them out of its search index, and said publishers running them risk a reduced trust score. Time and Mobian dispute the characterization, and Howard said Perplexity’s crawlers kept accessing Time’s pages afterward. The IAB is reportedly developing a framework for measuring AI’s role in conversions; its VP of AI and marketing innovation, Caroline Giegerich, frames the open question as how to credit a conversion “to the entities that were involved along the way, of which AI is one entity.” James Clarke, global head of media and partnerships at Newell Brands, looked at agent advertising and passed. “If I have finite resources, I don’t know that I want to test there first.”
Read more at Ad Age.