TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In

TIME returns different pages based on User-Agent. Humans get full HTML; ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and OAI-SearchBot get a stripped Markdown version at 1/23 the size. The Markdown contains sponsored FAQs from Ally Bank and PMI that don't appear on the human-facing site. Every bot request generates a fresh UUID, counting each fetch as an ad impression billed by tokens. GPTBot and ChatGPT-User are blocked with 406, while OAI-SearchBot gets through—TIME is selectively serving the bot-only version.

Why it matters: A first-person experiment showing TIME serves a 13KB sponsored plain-text page to ClaudeBot and others, with named bots, advertisers, and size comparison. HKR all hit. Capped at 72 because it's an independent blog find, not an official announcement, and the event is more about...