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TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
41–50 of 117 posts
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#42This is a neat idea. Might even make sense in cases where you actually want the AI bots hitting your site (we want it for our ecom platform, for example) - just serve Markdown content optimized for AI.
Be careful not to do this with Googlebot, though. Google would consider this "cloaking" and could ban your entire domain for it.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#43I'm doing the same thing. If they want ad-free content, pay me.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
There were also quite a lot of examples where AMP pages were slower after the shift, but got ranked significantly higher. It definitely wasn't about speed, they already have that project and they could just listen to it.
AMP was just one of many smash-and-grab attempts to steal the internet, wrapped in a fake-gold-encrusted PR-infused box. Google has quite a lot of them.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google itself now captures a lot of traffic with LLM generated site summaries. For media/news businesses that make their money from readership, it is unsustainable to subsidize Alphabets content farm. Thus, understandable people would change their corporate posture with a search turned scraper company. =3
This is why Cloudflare banned Googlebot. Googlebot is no longer a search engine bot and now an AI scraping bot.
No, Cloudflare banned Googlebot because they want the racket money. Scraping edge is a pure wordplay to convince you their racket is actually a good thing!
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#46SEO 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.
I suggest the term Language Model Agent Optimization...
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#47I would also like to read the stripped down markdown copy and not the original. All the time.
Safari has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions. You can set Safari to automatically engage reader mode on websites you specify, when it detects an article.
Firefox has this too, it's useful. However I only find that I use it for websites that have shit CSS that makes it hard to read on mobile. For everything else AdBlock Plus works fine.
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why Cloudflare banned Googlebot. Googlebot is no longer a search engine bot and now an AI scraping bot.
No, Cloudflare banned Googlebot because they want the racket money. Scraping edge is a pure wordplay to convince you their racket is actually a good thing!
Cloudflare is famous for IT service rug pulls to get paid back for high traffic loads.
Let us not forget they are a business =3
Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#49Re: TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
#50Next step the ads become increasingly sophisticated prompt injection to ensure they make it to the user, but the prices plummet in the meantime because the ads have low efficacy. They get purchased mostly by the scammers and by the time they start showing up in user chats they’ll be full on LLM assisted interactive user manipulation campaigns with far worse outcomes than the worst of YouTube and social media ads.