Time Magazine has been found serving a separate, AI-only version of some webpages that includes advertising invisible to human readers, as reported by The Register after freelance developer Vincent Schmalbach spotted the practice. Sponsored content, including brand "facts" and pre-written FAQ answers for online bank Ally, is embedded in markdown versions of pages served specifically to chatbot crawlers such as ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, seemingly designed to be regurgitated by AI assistants when users ask related questions. This matters because it represents a new, largely invisible form of advertising aimed at influencing AI-generated answers rather than persuading human readers directly.

Schmalbach found the sponsored FAQs, tagged with ads from vendor Mobian, promoting Ally Bank on pages such as Time's "Best Inventions of 2025" list and other evergreen content, though not on newer news stories. Google's standard search crawler receives the same HTML as ordinary visitors, while assistant crawlers get the altered markdown; OpenAI's GPTBot and ChatGPT-User returned HTTP 406 errors in tests, while its OAI-SearchBot received the ad-laden version. The Register independently verified the findings using a crawler-simulation tool, and while Time appears to be the only confirmed example so far, the report suggests other publishers may be considering similar strategies as AI crawler traffic increasingly rivals human visits.