Time chief operating officer Mark Howard has explained how the US newsbrand is already commercialising an invisible bot-readable version of its website which is used to promote sponsored content.

He joined leading executives from Hearst UK, Axios, The Guardian, Washington Post, Future Plc, as well as speakers from sponsors Q5, PA Media and Equativ, on the Press Gazette News Yacht event at a marina on the fringes of the Cannes Lions conference for the global advertising industry.

The event was intended to assert the importance of publishers in an advertising world now dominated by a few giant tech platforms.

One of the key themes to emerge was the fact that publishers could become more important for brands in the age of AI-generated answers.

Time COO Howard said: “People come to the website time.com as you can know it, and we all experience it.

“Bots go to a markdown page, where it’s a stripped-down version, the content metadata.

“And we’re thinking a lot about what that experience looks like. So, we’ve got that for the ‘allow bots’, and then, of course, all the AI companies that we have our deals with.

“We have streams of content that we’re feeding them with only the content that they want, the content that we have the rights to license, so there’s a lot going on there.”

Speaking on a panel sponsored by Equativ and Propeller, he said: “We’re now working with different brands on doing branded content programmes, where specifically we’re building content for that purpose, we’re routing that content to the markdown pages.”

He added: “We know that our domain authority, in terms of the AI bot activity from those LLMs, is already very high, and by being able to push it through that specific channel we are taking it one step further.”

Howard said Time was looking at a “whole suite of different product offerings” seeking to influence how brands are portrayed on AI answer engines – which also include branded content on Youtube and Linkedin.

He said: “It’s really taken off for us. What’s interesting is you introduce something like this to your sales team and immediately it’s over their head, then what’s happened is we’ve had probably a half a dozen inquiries because we got the press from announcing it, where brands are saying ‘that’s our problem, help us’, and now the sales team is saying, ‘okay, this is incredible, we have an opportunity, we need to jump on this’.”

He added that Time is now working on a “pure data product that doesn’t even get published to the web… it’s just marketing to the bots” because, he said, “bots not only are increasingly able to purchase, but they are informing purchases much more, and that’s only going to increase”.

‘84% of AI citations come from publishers’

Speaking on the same panel Isabel Perry, of technology and marketing company Dept, was asked how important publishers are to brands in a world where AI answer engines are taking their audience.

She said: “Every brand was coming to us saying we’ve got a 69% zero click-through from Google search, where our traffic has dropped massively, and I imagine everyone in this room as a publisher is also already seeing that, and the question then becomes, how can we optimise organic visibility on generative engines?”

She added: “84% of AI citations are publishers… so it’s incredibly important. It’s growing. I think publishers just have to rethink the role that they’re playing in that relationship.”

Muck Rack found last month that earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations, while content categorised as journalism makes up 27% of cited sources.

Axios is helping commercial partners to ‘pop’ on AI platforms

Axios chief revenue officer Jacqueline Cameron told another News Yacht panel, sponsored by PA Media, how the US newsbrand is also seeking ways to turn its high visibility on LLMs into marketing products.

The newsletter-powered title rented a huge superyacht for the duration of the Cannes Lions festival as a venue for sponsored events and meetings with marketers.

Cameron said: “We’re here in Cannes, talking to partners about what we know about why we’re currently popping in the LLMs…

“One of the things that we know is that it’s the top 30% of all content that is oftentimes scraped, and then the LLM moves on. At Axios, we write in smart brevity, so we actually publish the most important things in our article up top. What is new and why does it matter?

“So it sort of lends itself naturally to the way that the LLMs are currently working.”

Operations director at PA Media Martin Ashplant said AI had sped up the pace of product development to “a matter of days” for the UK’s national news agency.

He said: “This has included the upcoming rollout of a creator-journalism tool which enables you to take our raw video, turn it into the bits that are most relevant to your audience, and then add your own columnist talking about it, or your own reporter talking about it, so being able to use that technology to turn the raw materials into something that’s unique and authentic, no matter who your audience is, and that’s technology empowering us.”

Juliet Scott-Croxford, president of North America for Q5, hosted a News Yacht discussion on maximising audience value.

Washington Post chief revenue officer Karl Wells revealed how the technology behind the brand’s Ask the Post in-house chatbot has been turned into an advertising product.

He said: “If our audiences have been preconditioned to consume information in that way, and we’re allowing for that on our platform, we should also allow for that to be an advertising format too. Anything shiny and new for advertisers is helpful and it drives a ton of engagement.”

AI-powered ad planning at Hearst UK

Hearst UK CEO Katie Vanneck Smith described an in-house product called Aura IQ which uses agentic AI to analyse first-party reader data across the publisher’s brands to deliver a “smart ad planning product strategy”.

She said it means marketing campaigns are delivered for brands with “better speed, better targeting and less wastage”.

Future launched a new service called Optic in February which aims to leverage the high prominence of its brands in AI answers to help promote paying advertisers.

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