Edition #541
Ads to AI Agents, bots vs agents and principal media.Â
Recently Cloudflare proclaimed bots had overtaken humans. The leap that many made, is that AI agents had taken over the internet. But the story is a little more nuanced.
Yes, the growth in bots, has been driven by AI agents. But to say half the internet is now AI agents, isn’t correct.
Lets draw a distinction
- A crawler bot, that fetches your website to appear in a search engine.
- An AI agent, fetching information for their next model build.
It’s the latter, which is irritating web owners.
However, the bulk of requests from AI agents, isn’t that, it’s:
- An AI agent, requesting specific information for a request, that a user has asked them.
Short form this is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) bot, an information request to validate or anchor an AI response in a real world source. And there are way more of these, because it has a one to one relationship with a user request.
Second to that, news sites, will get a lot of requests on the front page, category pages, to see new stories. After all, the LLMs have to be up to date too.
Will these types of requests, take over the internet? Likely! Unless, there is developed better mechanisms for it. Think sitemaps, at scale, it might make more sense for an RSS type feed, where AI agents can access that.
But why hasn’t this emerged yet? We see early glimpses, with LLMs.txt, or Cloudflare Firewall or Microsoft PCM. Technology solutions to access the content. My take is that the LLMs will develop their own content programmes, like a Google Webmaster Tools, to let folks manage. This in turn, might have a technical spec attached. And users get analytics in return, as well as licensing revenue.
Should you have your knickers in a twist about this? Well, lets do back of an envelope calculation. Let’s say 1,000 queries in an LLM is worth $50 of revenue. And 1% of users click out from an LLM request. If you see, 100 clicks from an LLM, you were maybe cited (amongst others), 10,000 times. So $500 of revenue. And then, if you’re a smaller creator, you get 1/3 revenue share. That’s $150, then you split that amongst the other sites, cited. Let’s say there’s 5. You’re about $30 of revenue. But you also got the 100 clicks originally. Which has value.
Examine your traffic, how much are you getting from LLMs? That gives you a steer.
Returning to the bots vs AI agents, we do see the growth of fraud too. TheTradeDesk has reported an uptick in new sites, being spun up by AI. Like any technology the bad guys get it too. So bad guy buys are on the rise too.
We also have to remember hygiene bots, these help the internet keep working. That little iMessage preview from a website, that requires a quick bot to fetch that. Or Meta will scan urls, that have been shared on Facebook, to make sure it’s still safe.
They will keep scanning, them, in case someone changes it and now it’s a security issue. Or even just your browser, some browsers will prefetch the next page, to make your browsing experience faster. Or for publishers, bots which enable contextual targeting, helping them drive ad revenue.
So when you hear AI agents are taking over the internet, dig a little deeper.
Notable stories this week
- Advertising’s next audience isn’t Human. So we must rethink the value of non human traffic.
- LinkedIn declares war on Slop with “seems like AI slop” button.
- Exclusive: Prediction markets get their own media company.
- AI Slop is fooling advertisers verification tools.
- Xbox’s new bet on advertising could shake up gaming — if players don’t revolt.
- Verve expands its AI Advertising platform with AI Native Ads Solution.
- Demystifying open source MMM.
- OpenAI introduces conversion optimization, app install attribution and advanced matching.
- Why is the podcast ad market so messy?
- X is no longer throttling posts with links.
- Higgsfield names Mariam Asmar as first enterprise marketing exec.
- Time has started serving ads to AI agents.
- Inside Unilever’s 300,000 creator network: the logistics behind the headline number.
- How AI costs are quietly reshaping principal media deals.
- Snapchat shores up lead gen ads with new HubSpot integration.
- The latest darlings of social media marketing? Regular people with 500 followers.
- NBCU, YouTube strike distribution deal that bundles premium services.
- Google’s buyer direct could beat agentic ad tech at its own game.
- Disney overhauls streaming service to jumpstart subscriber growth.
- Google now lets you track your social properties in Google Search Console.
- Manufacturing intent.
- [Smart take] The New Brand Folklore.
Deals/M&A
- People explores sale of The Daily Beast again
- Europe got its own TBPN style live show, and everyone’s angling for a guest spot.
Campaign of the week
- Genesis conceived of the idea & backed Maggie Gylenhall, Flesh Impact this week.
Smartest commentary
- “One theory I have is that the research points to a dividing line in how humans feel about AI output. When an AI’s output is objective—something we don’t expect to come from the voice and perspective of another human—we don’t really care if an AI made it. We don’t care if an AI coded an app, or helped with back-end research for a piece, or checked for typos. Conversely, we do care when the output is subjective—something we expect to come from the unique voice and perspective of another human being. Which explains why people consistently rate content negatively when they know it was generated by AI.” –Joe Lazer.
Datapoints of note
- Microsoft search ad growth drops to 10%.
- AI slop accounts for 1.3 to 2.4% of open web programmatic spend.
- The report found that AI slop sites score better on certain metrics than legitimate publishers. Only 0.05% of AI slop traffic was flagged as invalid, compared to 0.32% for legitimate websites. Viewability was 77.2%, versus 74.9%. Once measurability was factored in, AI slop sites graded as premium more than 70% of the time, and CPMs for AI slop peaked at $7.08, ahead of the $6.15 average for legitimate content.
Events
- Advertiser CMO breakfast in October.
That’s it for this week.
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