Some companies are using ads to influence AI agents

It’s no secret that agents are slowly taking over the internet. Automated traffic across the internet increased almost eight times faster than human activity last year, according to a March report from cybersecurity company Human Security.

But how is a brand to influence them?

As agentic infrastructure continues to develop and as some consumers begin deploying agents to shop or perform other tasks, companies across industries are not only grappling with optimizing their websites for agents but are trying to figure out how to advertise to them. Many brands are thinking beyond just answer engine optimization (AEO) and are working on how to engage directly with agents to drive sales or impact how the agents perceive them, according to executives we spoke to.

“[Agents are] still emerging as a channel,” Fiona Tan, Wayfair’s chief technology officer, told Marketing Brew. “We want to just make sure we’re keeping very close to how consumers are changing their behavior and then reacting as quickly as possible, and in some cases, proactively providing that information.”

High time

Advertising to agents is top of mind at the publisher Time magazine, as the number of days where it sees more bot traffic than human traffic to its site is increasing, according to Mark Howard, the publication’s chief operating officer. He cited data from Ally Bank showing that consumers who came to the brand from AI referrals tended to have a higher conversion rate and were further down the funnel by the time they got to the brand, which he said makes them an attractive opportunity for its advertising partners.

Advertising to agents directly is one way brands can promote messaging about their products and potentially mitigate incorrect information that AI models may be propagating about them, Howard explained. To capitalize on those opportunities, Time is partnering with ad-tech platform Mobian to run Agent Ads, an ad format designed to be readable to agents.

How do Agent Ads work? Howard broke down an Agent Ad showcasing Ally that was running on Time’s site. Time reroutes agents to a “markdown” page containing metadata and identification of the sponsored ad; the agent is then exposed to brand-verified facts and other core ad information, like, in Ally’s case, its founding date and the fact that it is a financial services company. The page closes out with information on where the content of the ad came from, and a disclosure that the ad has concluded. After all that, the agent can then access the actual webpage itself.

These agent-specific ads are served to Time’s “allow list” of about 70 agents and bots that are allowed to crawl the site.

“We know as these AI agents come to the site, they’re scraping the page, they’re retaining the information from the page, and oftentimes they’re storing a lot of that information for the ability to either be presented in that moment or in the future without having to necessarily come back to the page and scrape it again,” Howard said. “It’s about getting those brand facts into that knowledge layer of the AI.”

In the details

It goes beyond influencing agents through ads itself. Optimizing one’s site is key to attracting agents to a brand’s page to crawl it in the first place. While agentic traffic to Wayfair is still “pretty nascent,” Tan said, the company is continuing to add attributes, the information merchants use to describe their products, to provide agents with more information to make recommendations in response to user queries. Wayfair has also been involved in the infrastructure buildout for agentic commerce, partnering with Google as part of a Universal Commerce Protocol that aims to streamline e-commerce activities.

While some brands are already thinking about advertising to agents, many are still figuring out AEO and how to appear more visible to AI platforms. Tech companies continue to churn out related solutions; in June, Adobe debuted Adobe Brand Visibility, an enterprise platform that aggregates data, including agent traffic data, to help brands see how models are crawling their sites and optimize their online presence. In August, Cloudflare released its AEO Visibility Dashboard, which helps brands understand if and how AI assistants recommend their products to consumers.