[News] How Time and others are rebuilding parts of the web for AI agents

Publishers are redesigning their sites for AI agents as bots become a dominant traffic source. Time now blocks all AI crawlers by default, whitelisting approved bots and serving them stripped‑down markdown versions of articles via TollBit, cutting token usage by up to 90 % and speeding retrieval to 0.25 seconds. The Economist is piloting agent‑readable formats for marketing and B2B copy, weighing exposure against paywall value. A third outlet is testing Web Model Context Protocol (WebMCP), a Google‑Microsoft standard that lets sites share structured data directly with agents, lowering CDN costs and improving citation rates. French daily Le Monde is also experimenting with agent feeds and subscriber detection. Yet consultants caution that building for bots adds cost without ad revenue, urging publishers to adopt agent‑friendly layers only when long‑term discovery value outweighs the expense.