The Economist is testing new ways of structuring content to be read solely by agents as AI engines increasingly surface and summarize news, reports Jessica Davies of Digiday.
Davies reports, “For now, the subscription publisher is experimenting with agent‑readable versions of content that already sits outside its paywall — chiefly marketing copy and B2B sales material — and restructuring those surfaces for AI answer engines.
:The bet is that discovery won’t start on homepages or even in search boxes, but with AI intermediaries acting on a user’s behalf. As Josh Muncke, vp of generative AI at The Economist Group, told Digiday, the publisher is preparing for ‘a world with two versions of the web’ — one optimized for rich, human reading experiences, and another where ‘agents want clear structure, questions and answers, ideally text,’ not carousels and feature art.
“’There are some obvious places we must do that,’ Muncke told Digiday. ‘We want our marketing content to be findable and discoverable and optimized for agents. And then we obviously need to think deeply about how and what portions of our editorial content should also appear in those kinds of surfaces.’
Naturally, being a subscription publisher, The Economist has to be forensic about which marketing pages and teasers sit outside the paywall, and how much agent‑legible content it can afford to give away without eroding the value of a subscription.”
Read more here.
