Your Website's Second Audience Just Got Its Own Ads

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: A few months ago I built an agent-optimized version of this site: when an AI crawler asks for a page, it gets clean Markdown instead of my full HTML. Time Magazine built the same thing, then did something I didn’t: it started selling ad space inside that Markdown. AI crawlers now receive a sponsored FAQ unit, written by a brand, that no human visitor ever sees. Detection is plain User-Agent matching, every fetch mints a fresh impression ID, and the “impression” is measured in tokens, not eyeballs. This is Part 1 of three: the mechanics down to the HTTP headers. Part 2 tests whether the ad actually changes an agent’s answer; Part 3 asks who ends up paying.

A layer I built, and someone else monetized

Back in March I wrote about making this website agent-friendly: a small edge function that hands AI crawlers a stripped-down Markdown version of each page instead of the full, image-heavy HTML a browser gets. It was a capability post. Agents read the web now, they pay a token tax for every byte of markup they don’t need, so give them a clean representation and everyone wins.

schristoph.online

Your Website's Second Audience Just Got Its Own Ads

A layer I built, and someone else monetized