More bots read Time magazine than humans do.

That was a wake-up call to the publisher that it had to adapt its content and website for the majority of its readers, Michael Mraz, General Manager and Chief Product Officer, told attendees at Contentstack’s ContentCon conference in Chicago in October.

“That raised a pretty fundamental question: Were we actually built for the audience we now have?” he said.

Time knew it needed to adapt, but improving its website would be challenging. Its website was “creaky,” with four different front ends, dozens of different content templates, competing code bases and archive databases dating back to Windows XP, Mraz said. The last time it updated its content management system was in 2014.

Time Magazine Publishes Bot-Specific Articles and Ads

Time embarked on replatforming its content management system to make its content easier for bots to read and load faster for its human readers, plus make the entire process smoother for its journalists.

It took five months to update its system, and the new site is now faster and more personalized for humans, and easier for AI agents to read.

Time chose Contentstack for its modular and headless system, making it easier to update over time. For readers, that also translates to much faster load times. For example, the time to first contentful paint decreased by 27% compared with its old system, Mraz said. This all led to an increase in conversion, he added.

For its millions of AI agent readers, Time now has a Markdown version of every page it publishes just for bots to read. What’s more, it now embeds ads within that Markdown layer, serving them directly to those AI agents. It is using ad tech startup Mobian to create this new format.

“In July, Time became the first publisher in the world to serve ads directly to AI agents,” Mraz said. “We strongly believe agent ads will be a big part of the future of marketing and we’re proud to be early.”

Time Launches AI-Powered Newsletter

The new system allows Time to launch products faster and more easily. For example, it recently relaunched its newsletter business with five AI agents handling it. Mraz called the technology an “AI harness” that allows the agents to work from a model with its business rules and subscriber data.

“The harness sits between Time’s journalism, our business and the reader’s inbox, and it enables our small cross-functional team to operate like a much larger one,” he said.

Another new product it launched was a games section on its site, which took weeks instead of months to build.

Time Magazine Embraces AI Tools

Prior to its content management system upgrade, Time magazine had already started embedding AI tools into its website. It has a sitewide AI agent, powered by Time’s content archive, that can summarize articles, read them aloud or translate them into 13 languages. Readers can ask the agent for information, which it sources only from Time magazine articles.

“It extends the life and reach of every story we publish, making trusted journalism accessible to global audiences in new ways that feel immediate and personal,” Mraz said.

Time also built an AI-generated podcast. The magazine’s human editors select the day’s most important stories, and two AI-generated voices host the podcast. Editors can approve, tweak or regenerate any episode before it goes live, so they keep editorial oversight. This gives Time’s journalism a different format, suited to increasingly popular ways people consume content.

Time has weathered many technology upheavals, from having to compete with TV news, the internet, social media, smartphones and now AI. With its recent updates, Time is confident it can weather this technology disruption, too.

“As user behavior changes, and it is changing fast, trusted journalism reaches fewer people every year if it doesn’t take new forms,” he said.