AI crawlers receive sponsored FAQ copy

Time is serving sponsored brand FAQs to selected AI crawlers, with 2 advertisers—Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute—confirmed as the first participants in the arrangement. The Register’s report says ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot receive markdown containing the copy, while ordinary visitors and Google’s standard crawler do not; a follow-up report quotes the adtech CEO saying the aim is to influence what assistants say about brands, though whether the material survives model-data filtering is unproven. Builders relying on AI-search referral measurement should treat crawler-specific pages as an evidence-integrity problem: record user agents and provenance, not just the text an assistant returns.