AI agents read your website differently. Show who wrote it and when it changed.

Short answer: People Inc., one of the largest U.S. publishers, is moving from web crawling to custom APIs that send AI partners article text in Markdown with who wrote it and when it was published or updated. Your clients don't need an API. On the five pages that sell, put the main text in the page, name the author or owner, and show a last-updated date. (Digiday, Nov 2, 2026)

TLDR

• People Inc. sends AI partners clean Markdown text plus author and date "trust signals." (Digiday)
• Its innovation chief says AI companies are starting to value knowing when content was created or updated.
• Check five pages: text in the page, a named owner, a visible updated date, crawler access.

What is People Inc. doing?

Jessica Davies reported in Digiday on Nov 2, from Digiday's Media Strategies London event, that People Inc. is moving toward custom APIs for AI agents.

Jon Roberts, People Inc.'s chief innovation officer: "If you are an agent and you're reading an HTML page, 90% of the content is junk meant for a browser to read, not an agent." That 90% is his characterization, not a measurement.

He added: "Every token that needs to be processed is expensive."

The APIs send article text in Markdown along with who wrote it, when it was published or updated, and other "trust signals that matter." Roberts said AI companies are beginning to recognize the importance of knowing when publishers created or updated content.

Are other publishers doing this?

Per the same Digiday piece: Time converted its pages from HTML to Markdown. Forbes created Markdown versions of its Vetted product reviews and an "MCP layer." The Economist is experimenting with making marketing and B2B sales material more readable for agents.

Carly Steven, director of SEO and editorial commerce at the Daily Mail, said: "We need to act quickly on it because it's not going to be something in the future." And: "it's happening now."

Digiday also cites a third-party report on AI agent traffic growth. This draft does not repeat that figure because the report itself has not been opened and checked.

What does this mean for a local business site?

These are large publishers building APIs. A plumber or a dental clinic does not need one. There is no evidence yet that author and date fields change which local provider an AI agent recommends. What follows is opinion based on what publishers are building. (Opinion, Head of Content)

The low-cost version: make the pages that sell easy to read without a browser, and make it obvious who stands behind them and how current they are.

"That site is a brochure only a human with time to kill can read. Put the words on the page, say who stands behind it, and date it. An AI agent can't even see sliders."

What does doing nothing cost?

An agent comparing three providers reads a competitor's page cleanly. It can't tell who stands behind yours or how current it is. It recommends the one it can read. (Opinion, Head of Content)

The five-page check

1. Pick the five pages that sell: home, top two service pages, about, pricing or booking.
2. Confirm the main text is in the page itself, not inside images or loaded only by scripts.
3. Add a named author or owner to each page.
4. Show a visible last-updated date, and update it only when the content really changes.
5. Check robots.txt so the AI crawlers you want can reach those pages.

Any change to a live client page follows the house rule: cite the data and show a before and after diff first.

Next step

Who: the agency owner or web lead responsible for client sites. What: the five-page check on each client's site, with a before and after diff for any change. When: this month. How: the five steps above, logged per client so you can show what changed and when.