Key points
- People Inc. is moving from web crawling and Amazon S3 buckets to custom APIs that deliver article text in Markdown, plus author, publish and update dates and trust signals.
- Chief innovation officer Jon Roberts says crawling is inefficient and that processing unneeded HTML tokens is expensive for AI systems.
- HUMAN's 2026 State of AI Traffic report puts growth in AI agent and agentic browser traffic at 7,851% year over year.
- Time, The Economist and Forbes are running their own tests with Markdown, agent-readable material and an MCP layer.
Why it matters for marketers: Content teams may soon need to prepare structured, agent-readable versions of their work, with clear authorship and dates, alongside pages built for human readers.
People Inc. is building custom APIs to give AI agents its journalism in a cleaner format, according to Digiday. Instead of making systems work through full webpages, the publisher sends article text in Markdown with details such as the author, publication and update dates, and other trust signals.
The company first gave partners access through web crawling, then through Amazon S3 buckets, which let it send updates and retract content. Chief innovation officer Jon Roberts said crawling is an inefficient way for AI systems to get information. He argued that most of an HTML page is meant for browsers, and that processing it adds cost and distracts agents. The company is not focused on advertising directly to AI agents, he added.
For marketers and content teams, the shift points to a new kind of publishing work: making content easy for machines to read and verify. Roberts said AI companies are starting to value knowing when content was created or updated, so accurate dates and authorship may carry more weight. The urgency is backed by HUMAN's 2026 State of AI Traffic report, which found AI agent and agentic browser traffic grew 7,851% year over year. Daily Mail's Carly Steven said the issue is "happening now," and publishers must separate useful agents from scrapers.
Other publishers are taking different routes. Time has converted pages from HTML to Markdown and started selling ads to visiting agents. The Economist is testing agent-friendly marketing and B2B sales material outside its paywall. Forbes has built Markdown versions and an MCP layer for its Vetted reviews, though its ad plans for agents are still in development.
Watch whether structured access becomes a standard offer to AI partners, and how publishers weigh control and efficiency against the open web. Teams that manage content can start by checking how clean their metadata is.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.
