A debate is brewing over the risks and rewards of serving ads to AI agents

Ads designed to influence AI agents rather than human consumers are emerging as a new marketing channel. They’re also opening up a new brand safety battleground.

The big outstanding question: Once the AI platforms get wise to brands advertising to their crawlers, will they play ball or try to stamp out the practice?

Here’s an example of how these ads function: Adtech startup Mobian recently worked with the publisher Time to serve “Agent Ads” for brands including Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute.

Previously, Time had created stripped-down, text-only versions of its webpages that AI agents could read more efficiently. Time then…