What happens when AI agents become the audience?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer of TIME, about how one of the world’s most iconic media brands is preparing for a web increasingly shaped by AI agents, AI crawlers, and machine-readable content.
TIME is now operating across what Mark describes as two internets: one built for human readers, with photos, design, layout, and the familiar red border, and another built for machines, stripped down into structured text that AI agents can crawl, parse, and use. We explore how TIME is using this shift to build new products, new internal workflows, and even a new kind of ad inventory designed for AI agents.
Mark walks us through the work behind TIME’s AI transformation, including how the team organized more than 100 years of journalism, nearly a million pieces of content, across scattered databases, PDFs, and legacy systems. We discuss the creation of a private LLM grounded in TIME’s archive, the launch of TIME AI, and how tools like summaries, translations, audio briefings, and article-level chat can expand access without changing the underlying facts of the reporting.
We also talk about what TIME considers sacred: trust, original reporting, editorial integrity, and the journalist-source relationship. Mark explains why TIME does not generate journalism with AI, how the editorial team shaped the product’s voice and guardrails, and why every company needs to define what AI should never touch.
Finally, we explore the agentic web, AI crawlers, GEO, publisher monetization, brand-verified facts, and what it means to sell ads to robots. Mark shares how TIME is thinking about crawler blocking, AI citations, referral traffic, markdown pages, and the future of media as AI search changes how people find information.
Guest
Mark Howard — Chief Operating Officer, TIME
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