SEO was yesterday, now it is AIO - you will have to wait longer for the results and likely you will need a lot more cash: pay TIME for the ads, wait until next model release and see what sticks, then rinse and repeat.
TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
31–40 of 117 posts
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#32I wonder if this also means that a normal user with a privacy-focused browser also gets this version. I can't see the point (except for click fraud?) of showing ads to AI, so it feels like this is more for the ad-blocking and privacy crowd.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#33Probably trying to take advantage of the cross session memory feature some LLM providers are increasingly integrating. Enough "suggestions" and it becomes a "fact" in that memory, and one day a user makes a somewhat relevant query and the model will be pushing those accumulated "facts" to said user.
Soon we'll be coding with agent assistance and it'll suggest we get some Carls Jr. Big Ass Fries.
"We've been going at it for some time now -- why don't we take a break? And you must be hungry -- I can recommend a great place..."
Yep, only a matter of time.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#34Sounds good to me, let the bots read the ads instead of the humans.
Will they get targeted ads? GPUs, RAM, spacious data centers near you!
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#35I wonder if this also means that a normal user with a privacy-focused browser also gets this version. I can't see the point (except for click fraud?) of showing ads to AI, so it feels like this is more for the ad-blocking and privacy crowd.
why would that “crowd” present themselves as bots by modifying their user agent string? the point is to poison someone’s agent with sponsored “knowledge” over time.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#36That's actually really neat, even without advertising I can serve humans my full page and AI bots a version with some parts removed. Or added.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#37I wonder if this also means that a normal user with a privacy-focused browser also gets this version. I can't see the point (except for click fraud?) of showing ads to AI, so it feels like this is more for the ad-blocking and privacy crowd.
why would that “crowd” present themselves as bots by modifying their user agent string? the point is to poison someone’s agent with sponsored “knowledge” over time.
That crowd doesn't -- but they often do the following:
- reject all 3rd party cookies
- selectively refuse to load 3rd party domains
- block javascript
- block webgl
- block webrtc
- block canvas
- use a generic user agent because "resist fingerprinting" is checked
- etc.
To a lot of sites, this makes you look like a bot. Most people don't go around deliberately spoofing their user agent these days. (and of course bots themselves can present whatever user agent they want.)
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#38I wonder if this also means that a normal user with a privacy-focused browser also gets this version. I can't see the point (except for click fraud?) of showing ads to AI, so it feels like this is more for the ad-blocking and privacy crowd.
The issue with that is it’s still a markdown page. I’d suspect it’s more about making sure people don’t get around ads, or possibly even cross-user memory/training.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a golden age where lots of websites had WAP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol ) versions available while also running their "normal website", and the WAP version was always like 1/100 of the size of the normal website. Still, "normal websites" were minimal compared to now, but when you were on modem, even those websites loaded slow. For some time, most of my browsing were via the…
There was also AMP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages ), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset. It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP…
> It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
That was the entire point of the tech. If Google had wanted they could have upranked simple and lightweight websites but they didn’t do that (at least not until whoever had used amp for their promo package left and the project was killed).
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#40[deleted]