For most of the web’s history, publishers made money because people showed up. Search sent them, they read, they saw ads, they clicked, and some of them subscribed. AI is breaking that arrangement. Chatbots absorb a site’s information and answer the question without sending a click back, and AI agents increasingly do the reading and the choosing before a human sees anything. Bot traffic, by Cloudflare’s count, has already overtaken human traffic on the web.
Listen or watch:
Choy Travers thinks that new audience can pay. He’s the co-founder of Oasy, an Amsterdam startup that detects AI bots on a publisher’s site and serves them sponsored content human readers never see, on the bet that an AI system will pick it up when answering somebody’s question. Publishers get the tool free. Advertisers buy on a CPM for bot traffic. Choy calls the category generative engine advertising, and yes, he knows the industry needed another acronym.
“If you do block the bots, you’re also canceling yourself, or removing yourself from the biggest search channel we have seen in a long, long time.”
The obvious objection came from Perplexity, which has called the practice cloaking. Choy doesn’t pretend the resemblance isn’t there. His answer is engineering: every sponsored snippet carries its disclosure as a single chunk, so an AI can’t ingest the message without the label. What the platform does after that is up to the platform. Who’s responsible if it strips the label anyway? In his view, the AI companies.
“Maybe the top players in each niche will be able to license and make money from these platforms, but that leaves probably more than 90 percent of everyone else still out there, unable to generate money while being scraped.”
Pete presses on measurement, which Choy concedes is the weak spot. Attribution in AI search today is a billboard on the motorway: you know it was seen, you can’t prove who bought because of it. His argument is that advertisers are learning to live with that, the way they once did with out-of-home, because the alternative is sitting out AI search while competitors don’t.
“These AI platforms are the sea everyone’s swimming in. Publishers are in their boats without oars, and we’re trying to give them oars.”
This episode is the second half of a two-part look at ads for bots. If you missed part one, Mark Howard, COO of TIME, on what the publisher that went first has learned, it’s here.
Disclosure: The Media Copilot has been running Oasy on this site for several months. This conversation is about whether the model works at scale, not about our results.
In this episode
Pete and Choy discuss:
- Why blocking AI crawlers means removing yourself from the fastest-growing search channel
- How Oasy’s model works: free for publishers, CPM for advertisers, one placement per page
- What an advertiser is actually buying when there’s no guaranteed placement
- Disclosure that has to survive a crawl, a chunk, and a summary
- Perplexity’s cloaking objection, and what it gets right and wrong
- Why licensing deals will pay the top players and leave the rest scraped
- Who is responsible when an AI platform strips the label
- Whether publishers weaken their authority by selling it to advertisers
- Pay-per-crawl versus pay-per-use, and the billboard problem in attribution
- The utopian and dystopian versions of the ads-for-bots future
About the guest
Choy Travers | Co-Founder, Oasy | LinkedIn | oasy.ai
About the show: To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.
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Produced by The Media Copilot.
Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
All rights reserved. © AnyWho Media 2026
TRANSCRIPT
[0:03] Pete Pachal
Hi, welcome to The Media Copilot. It’s a podcast about how AI is changing media, news, and communication. My name’s Pete Pachal. I covered tech for a long time as a journalist, and now I have deep conversations with the media people, the builders, and the creators who are all answering the question: how will we get information in the future? And how will that change the jobs and industries whose business is information, especially media?
One of the biggest questions in media right now is what happens when the audience isn’t human anymore? Publishers have spent decades building businesses around people coming to their websites. Search sent them traffic, people read stories, saw ads, clicked links, subscribed, and hopefully came back. AI is changing that bargain. Chatbots can crawl a publisher’s site, absorb the information, and then answer any user’s question without sending so much as a click back. And increasingly, AI agents may be making decisions themselves, researching products and narrowing the choices before a human ever sees them. So if bots are becoming a meaningful audience for publishers, can publishers actually make money from them? My guest this week thinks they can.
[1:19] Pete Pachal
Choy Travers is the co-founder and commercial lead of Oasy, an Amsterdam-based startup working on a very different kind of advertising model. Oasy detects AI bots when they visit a publisher’s site and serves them sponsored content that human readers don’t see. The idea is that an AI system might pick up the ad and eventually use it when answering somebody’s question. It’s a fascinating idea because it attempts to solve one of the biggest problems publishers have with AI right now: lots of machines consuming their content with very little economic value flowing back. But this gets complicated very fast. What exactly is an advertiser buying if there’s no guaranteed placement? How do you measure whether the message actually influenced an AI answer? How should advertising be disclosed when the audience seeing it is a machine? And what happens if the companies building the AI systems decide they don’t want publishers doing this at all?
[2:18] Pete Pachal
That last question’s become especially important. TIME has been experimenting with a similar approach through the ad tech company Mobian, and Perplexity recently pushed back hard on that concept, essentially arguing that showing material to an AI crawler that humans can’t see amounts to cloaking. So, full disclosure, I’ve also been running Oasy on The Media Copilot for a few months, and I’ve seen firsthand some of the bot activity it tracks. But this conversation isn’t about my site. I want to understand whether the model itself can work at scale and whether this represents a genuinely new advertising market for publishers. So today we’re going to talk about what bots are actually doing on publisher sites, what advertisers are willing to pay for, the fight over cloaking and disclosure, and whether there really is a media business to be built around machine attention.
Quick note: if you’re listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave a five-star review and maybe a nice comment. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe to the channel if you don’t mind. Those things really do help more people find the show. All right, let’s get started. Choy Travers, welcome to The Media Copilot.
[3:26] Choy Travers
Thank you, Pete. Great to be here.
[3:28] Pete Pachal
Awesome. So listen, before we get into all this, I’d love to know a little bit more about you. Who are you, and how did you end up working on this specific problem?
[3:39] Choy Travers
Yeah, it’s a funny story, really. I’m originally from London. I’m Chinese Scottish, so I grew up in the UK. One of my first work experiences was working for the Daily Mirror, which is of course a big publication within Reach, and I saw firsthand, obviously from a low level, what it is all about in digital publishing. I’ve since moved to Amsterdam. I did my studies in media and information, my master’s in new media and digital cultures. But my career has predominantly been in startups and scale-ups in go-to-market and commercial roles. Most recently, before co-founding Oasy, I was the founding go-to-market at an AI company in Amsterdam for nearly two years. And that was really my education into what’s happening in the AI space, especially to publishers as well. So I met my technical co-founder, and we originally wanted to do something within the agentic commerce wave that’s happening.
[4:37] Choy Travers
Our original idea was actually thinking that in this maybe-near future when AI agents are potentially buying things for people, this will change the way that brands have loyalty and make ads. So we thought, let’s do something around loyalty and retention, a product there. Then we saw Google and Shopify launch Universal Commerce Protocol, and they were already baking in a lot of these features. So we decided to look a little bit further down the agentic commerce funnel. I think a lot of people are really focused on this future where agents are buying things for us, and that’s agentic commerce. But if you go down the cycle a little bit earlier, we’re already seeing that AI is changing search and discovery. And that, of course, is something digital publishers, newspapers, magazines, blogs, anyone who has a website online, is feeling.
[5:34] Choy Travers
Industry reports and conversations we’re having: 40, 50, up to 60 percent website traffic loss every year for digital publishers. And if these publishers are dependent on programmatic advertising, people seeing their banner ads, their affiliate links, less website traffic literally means less revenue as well. So we saw a problem worth solving here. At the time when we started the company in January, the only real solution we saw was blocking the bots. And we immediately thought, okay, that’s one solution. But the problem with that is these AI scrapers, which I’m sure we’ll get into, if they want to scrape content, they will. So there’s an argument, I think a fair one, that blocking doesn’t completely work. So publishers are getting their content stolen essentially. And if it does manage to work and you do block the bots, you’re also canceling yourself.
[6:33] Choy Travers
Or removing yourself from the biggest search channel we have seen in a long, long time, which is AI search, which is only going to grow. Cloudflare’s CEO originally predicted bots will overtake human traffic on the web by 2027. We saw a couple of months ago that it’s already happened. And this is not just going to 10x, it might 100x, if not 1,000x. So human traffic for publishers is going down while AI bot traffic is going up. And our thesis is not to block the AI traffic, but turn it into a new advertising channel for advertisers that want specific publisher traffic. Publishers need new ways to make money, new revenue streams, and we see their AI traffic, putting ads there, as a way forward.
[7:23] Pete Pachal
Yeah, I think when you first reached out and we had our initial conversation a number of months ago, I immediately perked up about the idea because of the fundamental shift of the expectation of revenue. I’ve obviously been writing about the stuff you’ve been talking about for a while, in terms of publisher content getting harvested and it upsetting the business model, because CPM advertising depends on traffic. And so does affiliate to a large extent. It’s all about the traffic, people actually coming to your website. I’ve said it in the intro, I’ve said it a million times in many intros: it’s just one of these things that’s shifting. And the industry has been pulling its hair out, like, what do we do about this?
[8:15] Pete Pachal
The most obvious “solution,” or at least what the industry has been primarily focused on, is: how do we get the AI companies to pay up? How do they pay for the content? That’s where the focus suddenly went, and there’s been no end of licensing deals and lawsuits around that. And when you showed me, well, what if we could shift the expectation entirely so that it goes to the advertiser, and we figure out a way to essentially serve up ads to bots or these experiences, it’s that fundamental shift, which I’ve seen only a couple of times before, really. You had conventional display CPM advertising, which is obviously still in play and still a big part of the industry. But the thing I would liken it to is when affiliate became a real revenue model for publishers. This was in the 2010s, and I think The Wirecutter did some pioneering work here with Amazon affiliate links.
[9:11] Pete Pachal
That, to me, was like, oh, this is a fundamental business model shift here. And the thing we’re talking about now, which as shorthand I call “ads for bots,” I don’t know what formal name you have for it, but it feels like that. It feels like this idea of, let’s wrap our heads around changing the basic assumption of who is paying and how that commerce transacts. And it’s complicated, and let’s get into all the complications, I’d love to do that. But that to me is the big innovation here. So do you see it that way when you’re selling it? I guess what I’m asking is how it resonates with publishers, but you obviously have two different ends of the pipeline that you think about, the publishers and the advertisers. So given what I’ve said, is that the pitch that resonates with publishers? And then how do you talk about it on that fundamental level with each of those parts of your audience?
[10:30] Choy Travers
Yeah, so you got it exactly right. When we started, we had a chicken-and-egg problem. We have the publishers on one side and then we have the advertisers on the other side. We’re built with publishers in mind, to solve the problem they’re going through. So we give this to publishers for free. They get a dashboard where they can track their AI bot traffic and then decide what they want to do with that. Either they can make new content that the AI likes, or, what we recommend, start to advertise. And then we have the advertisers that we have those conversations with as well. What was the second part of the question?
[11:08] Pete Pachal
Oh, just what is the value prop that you point to for the advertisers? Which seems like it’s a little more complicated, because it speaks to the fundamental question I asked at the beginning, which is: what exactly are they buying if there’s this interpretive layer between the thing they’re putting on the site and whatever either comes up in an AI answer, or whatever context the bot is taking into account as it’s making decisions?
[11:41] Choy Travers
Yeah, for sure. So on the publisher side of things, it’s a very easy conversation, because they can see their website traffic going down. A lot of the time they can see their revenue for advertising going down, and this is a new revenue stream. As you mentioned, the advertiser conversation is a little bit different because this is a completely new field. We have seen a big rise in AI visibility platforms, AEO or GEO: Profound, Promptwatch, Peec AI. And before then, advertisers were very used to Google Analytics, Google traffic, clicks, metrics. You can have an argument about how precise that is, but it’s at least something. When it comes to AI visibility, it’s a lot harder, and the key problem everyone in the industry faces is attribution.
[12:37] Choy Travers
So what we do for advertisers, to give them some sort of measurement when we inject their advertisements onto a publisher’s site, is we use these verified platforms like Promptwatch. We take AI visibility from both our publisher and AI visibility from the advertiser we’ve matched them with, and then we can track brand uplift over time through the AI visibility. This is the best anyone can do at the moment, but we are working with our measurement partners to get something closer to referrals or clicks. Right now we sell CPM for AI bot traffic.
[13:16] Pete Pachal
And let’s talk a little bit about disclosure in this. How do you handle that with regard to what the bot is seeing? Because the whole selling point, and this is always, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a gray area, but it is where the line is between commercial and editorial, which is always an important conversation. And it’s always in the details when we’re talking about advertising in some way. As you know, I wrote about this recently. That just feels like the layer that’s really hard to pin down, because by its nature AI has this probability to it, right? Is it interpreting things correctly or not? And yeah, you can put guardrails on, and we’re also understanding this is the infancy of this technology as well. But it’s certainly an important aspect to it. So how do you handle disclosure, and how do you expect that disclosure to then be rendered in the end product, whatever that may be?
[14:20] Choy Travers
Yeah, disclosure is really important. What we control is every fragment or snippet of advertiser content we put onto the publisher’s site. We make sure it carries a label, so it’s sponsored, and none of these chunks arrives unmarked. But what we can’t control, and that’s on the AI platform side, is they choose what to take or not. They may paraphrase, they may take the chunk, they may not. That’s entirely up to them. So yeah, it’s very interesting where this is going.
[14:57] Pete Pachal
Yeah, for sure. And as you think about what an experience with an ad in the way that you’re doing it looks like vis-a-vis a native ChatGPT ad, obviously ChatGPT has its own advertising system, and in a minute we’ll get into what the AI companies might think about this both conceptually and in terms of execution. But just on the user experience first: it seems like it would be a different type of disclosure that you would see in the case of an Oasy ad working as opposed to a ChatGPT ad working? Or do you see that as generally a similar thing, just different attribution? How would you characterize it as, oh, this is a good experience and everyone clearly knows what’s what?
[16:01] Choy Travers
Yeah, so ChatGPT ads of course are sponsored by ChatGPT, and that’s dependent on OpenAI and their platform. We run independently on the publisher’s own website traffic. So we see ourselves more like a native advertising company within AI. And it’s up to the different AI models then to serve our ad if appropriate. We apply the sponsor text, we make sure it’s labelled like that, we get publisher and advertiser approval before anything goes out. And then it’s in the hands of the AI platforms.
[16:40] Pete Pachal
And is there any kind of minimum data cleanup, in terms of what a publisher needs to have to ensure that’s carried over properly? I assume it’s just your regular schema, practicing good SEO. How much of that matters?
[17:01] Choy Travers
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Yeah, a lot of it goes back to traditional SEO. Usually there’s a correlation between human website traffic and AI bot traffic as well. So we don’t claim to help you get more AI bot traffic, but the AI bot traffic you are receiving, we want to do something with that. We want to turn that into an advertising channel and a revenue channel too.
[17:25] Pete Pachal
And in terms of alignment, we talked a little bit about the tech there, but the content itself: how important is it that the content aligns with the ad in any kind of direct way? In other words, you wouldn’t necessarily do this in the old world either, advertising GLP-1 drugs on a tech site or whatever, right? That probably wouldn’t happen. But does there need to be an even closer alignment between the advertiser and the subject of the site, or the topics the site covers, with this kind of tech?
[18:12] Choy Travers
Yeah, definitely. So, for example, we can take an online magazine all about running, and we could try to inject an advertisement about cooking equipment, pots, pans, stoves. We could do that a million times and it probably would never get surfaced within your ChatGPT or Claude answer because it’s not relevant. So number one is the publisher and the advertiser need to be highly correlated for the AI to even consider adding it. So it has to be very relevant, yeah.
[18:47] Pete Pachal
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. So let’s get into it. Let’s talk about the whole thing that Perplexity has been accusing this new type of ad of. Obviously they’re talking about the TIME and Mobian thing, but conceptually it’s very similar. Perplexity, as I understand it, has essentially said that it’s giving the crawler sponsored information that ordinary readers don’t see, so it’s calling it cloaking. Do you understand their point? Why do you think it’s right or wrong? What do they get right and what do they get wrong?
[19:19] Choy Travers
Yeah, firstly on the cloaking side of things. Cloaking was originally Google’s spam policy to improve rankings, change different things. So we don’t touch ranking signals, and we see ourselves closer to native advertising, or publisher-approved. But there is a real resemblance, which I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But that’s the question the industry needs to settle: whether the content and disclosure we add makes that acceptable. And Perplexity is one of the first AI platforms to have a stance on this. Firstly, we found it really cool that TIME made public the advertising to AI agents, because that was, in all honesty, great for us. A lot of the conversations we were having, the bigger publishers and the bigger advertisers, were all waiting for a first mover, essentially.
[20:14] Choy Travers
So that’s what we saw with TIME, which has really accelerated a lot of things as well. So then you see that, then you get the pushback. First TIME started doing this, there was a lot of questions about cloaking, a lot of questions about what the AI platforms are going to do. And now we’ve seen the first mover is Perplexity, and they’ve decided to block that. The way we see it is, it’s a little bit of an engineering problem. AI systems, when they read a page, don’t ingest the page whole. They split it into chunks and then retrieve the relevant ones. So what we do is we have a sponsored snippet that has the disclosure attached. So it should be taken as a whole. There should never be no disclosure attached. I think Perplexity was worried that you would miss the disclosure and it would get answered in the usual answer, which would basically give users false information. That seems to be the main worry.
[21:23] Pete Pachal
Yeah, and I also found it interesting that Perplexity was the first one to object in some way, simply because they seem to have backed away from an advertising model. And ChatGPT, conversely, has gone whole hog and they seem to be building up their own infrastructure. How are you thinking about, I guess, what are you hearing from the other major AI engines? Do you feel like Perplexity is going to be the beginning of an industry-wide pushback? Or do you think it opens up a lane for someone to be the advertiser-friendly model? Because the other thing that this does, since it does potentially open up a revenue stream for publishers, presumably that would ease the pressure off the fundamental AI question, right?
[22:21] Pete Pachal
Well, if you’re going to not let publishers sell ads to bots, then let’s go back to, hey, you pay us for our content. So I feel like there’s a bit of a dilemma here, although because of the pressures that ChatGPT’s put on itself with its own ad platform, that seems to me like, oh, it’s encroaching on our territory. So again, it’s a lot of dimensions. Again, it’s all in its infancy, but you’re obviously living this every day. Which direction do you see the winds blowing?
[22:53] Choy Travers
Yeah, and of course no one can tell the future. What we’re seeing is this industry is changing by the week, by the month. Perplexity is the first one to put their foot down. However, it doesn’t change the fact that there is not a fair value exchange going on. Perplexity and the others steal, well, stealing is a strong word, but I think a lot of people would agree with me there.
[23:13] Pete Pachal
People have used it before, even on this podcast, so it’s okay.
[23:22] Choy Travers
They’re scraping publishers’ content, they’re benefiting, they’re making a lot of money. Publishers, there’s a catch-22 going on, because they need publishers’ content to keep going, but publishers are not getting paid. So Perplexity can block them, but there still needs to be money to be made. So yes, one argument is it’s going to be licensing. The problem I see with that is maybe the top players in each niche will be able to license and make money from these platforms, but that leaves probably more than 90 percent of everyone else still out there, unable to generate money while being scraped. And it’s such a tough position for them to be in. So I do believe, and of course I’m biased, we’re betting big time on advertising to AI. But I think there is a future in which these AI platforms allow publishers to do this, and it can be similar to the days of banner ads on a site or affiliate links, but just within AI. And we aim to be that advertising layer.
[24:19] Pete Pachal
So let’s do a quick thought experiment. Everything you said makes total sense. And Perplexity, you can look at it and see, okay, I see how they’re interpreting this. What if there was a bad actor? In other words, what is the difference between what you’re doing and trying to do in a legit way, that builds a whole business model and potentially an ads-for-robots industry, versus someone trying to manipulate? What’s the counterexample where it’s like, oh, this is a bad actor? What would they be doing differently?
[24:57] Choy Travers
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. And I guess that’s the same with every ad channel that’s ever arrived. There’s always going to be spam, there’s always going to be scammers trying to do wrong, and there probably has to be regulation put in place. But I think the AI systems are very smart. They can choose what is acceptable, and they can tell spam from not. So it’s going to be up to them. If they want to allow this, they will. But otherwise, yeah, I’d be interested to see what happens. I’m not sure.
[25:35] Pete Pachal
And what do you think about, getting to the specific cloaking objection: why not, if it is legit information or legit sponsored content, why not have the human reader be able to see it too?
[25:53] Choy Travers
I think it goes back to the point that humans, a lot of the time, are not clicking or seeing a publisher’s page anymore. Of course, there’s the whole topic of the end of the click, or death of the click, or zero click. And that’s exactly the point. People are not going into web pages, publisher pages, anymore. They are staying within their ChatGPT, their Claude window. So the traditional advertisements shown to humans are never being seen. It’s great for the user, it’s great for the AI platforms. You get your information packaged very nicely. But the publisher’s not making money from the ads anymore. There needs to be another way, and we see this as being the way.
[26:37] Pete Pachal
And you had mentioned in the last answer regulation, which is an interesting idea. I’d like to zoom out a little bit and think about just the responsibility here, right? Normally a disclosure happens at the point where the person encounters the ad. Here it’s something that needs to survive a crawl and then be processed, summarized, et cetera. And that’s a process. We’ve already talked about the potential ambiguity there. But my question now is, who is responsible? Where does that, and it’s probably somewhat shared, but I’d love your answer on this: who’s responsible for making sure that the user knows that commercial information is in the answer, correctly labeled, et cetera, that there is a chain of disclosure and that everything is working properly? Again, we understand how it would work properly, but where does the buck stop on that?
[27:45] Choy Travers
Yeah, so I believe the AI companies. I believe it lands on them. It’s going through their interface. Yes, we’re doing native advertising within AI, but it’s still them that are showing this information to the user. This could change. I’m not exactly sure where this is going to go, but what I do know is the AI platforms are looking out for themselves. Users get a great experience. Publishers are the ones suffering. So we are taking the side of the publisher. And I think eventually it will fall on the AI platform. Yeah.
[28:21] Pete Pachal
So it’s like, yeah, you’re doing everything you can, right? We’ve set this up, we’re putting in disclosures, everything’s clearly labeled for the machine, the publishers are doing it transparently. If something gets screwed up in your crawl, that’s on you. It seems like that’s the implication.
[28:41] Choy Travers
Exactly. The way I see it is, these AI platforms are the sea everyone’s swimming in. Publishers are in their boats without oars, and we’re trying to give them oars.
[28:48] Pete Pachal
Sure. No, I got it. Cool. Okay. So I’m curious about your thoughts. I know you’re not a publisher, but you’ve certainly worked for them and you understand their concerns. To me there’s a bit of a deeper publisher question. If publishers are starting to insert some paid messages in the information that the bots consume, I sometimes think about this, and I think this goes hand in hand with almost any commercial exercise, but the lines are where this gets interesting, in the gray areas. Is there a danger that they’re going to weaken their authority by selling that authority to advertisers, with a bit of a black box in between what they’re doing and the AI engine? I definitely understand the motivations and everything around it, we just talked about it, but that to me is a little bit of an existential question. I know there’s no clear answer on this, but how do you think about it?
[29:50] Choy Travers
Sure, I think that’s something we think about. We don’t want to upset publisher or content integrity, with the authority. I think that is a real concern, but only if you oversupply it. So if you overdo it with the amount of ads or sponsored text you’re putting in there. I think the inventory is only worth anything when the publisher is trusted. So we constrain that to one placement per page. And the publisher has control over the advertiser and copy as well.
[30:22] Pete Pachal
And just curious again, zooming out on Oasy itself, how do you see it? Is it an ad tech company? Is it a platform? Is it publisher infrastructure? How do you describe it, and it might change from audience to audience. So is it all of the above?
[30:40] Choy Travers
In a way, it’s all of the above. We’re looking to be the marketplace between publishers and advertisers in this AI era. And we’re even starting to call it GEA, generative engine advertising. Of course there’s GEO. So, exactly, there’s so many acronyms out there, so why not add another one?
[30:57] Pete Pachal
Oh, we needed another acronym, so thank you.
[31:15] Choy Travers
We’re just trying to help publishers, and we think that the advertising industry, especially the advertising-and-AI industry, is booming, and there’s a great connection there. I think by 2030 digital advertising is going to be worth $1.3 trillion, if I’m correct. So there is opportunity for publishers not only to survive but thrive. And we’re hoping we can help them do that.
[31:30] Pete Pachal
So Cloudflare, I know, has been talking about pay-per-crawl for a while. This year they talked about pay-per-use. These are all models around what a crawler does and when the person with the content gets paid. Pay-per-crawl is all about, you get paid when it crawls it. And pay-per-use is, if it actually ends up in an AI answer, then you get paid for it. And so they’re moving to pay-per-use, or at least they’re trying to, because it seems like that’s a better representation of the value of whatever they’ve done. So it seems like your solution has this almost parallel structure on the advertising side, where you want to get paid for a verified use of the content as opposed to just the placement of it.
[32:24] Pete Pachal
And do you feel like that’s the direction? I think that’s what you were alluding to with the challenge of measurement, right? Because I would imagine that’s what a lot of advertisers want to see. It’s all well and good to be crawled, but I want to see some effect from that, some conversion. We’re moving from pay-per-crawl to pay-per-use, and that seems to be what’s built into your platform. I just want to understand the fundamental of, when an advertiser has its stuff crawled, when are they satisfied, or when will they pay up? Because it’s like, oh, I see this, I’m getting conversions because of this, and that’s accurately measured. Is that the fundamental value prop to them?
[33:21] Choy Travers
Yeah, and I think this is changing as well. I think there’s both education and learning going on from not just publishers, but brands, advertisers, affiliates. I’ve been in rooms where the conversation is, maybe there’s a future where you don’t have exact attribution and you have to live with that anyway. So right now we are giving everything we can in terms of attribution, using these AI visibility tools to help with that. And we see it the same as out-of-home advertising. The billboard on the side of the motorway, within AI. You see a billboard outside, you know that people have seen it. You don’t know how many people purchased your products because of that. That’s where we are right now, and where the industry is right now in AI visibility. But we’re getting closer and closer to attribution, and soon there will be better methods. But right now, that’s the industry standard. And the choice is accept it, or not be in AI search when your competitors are.
[34:28] Pete Pachal
Yeah, it’s funny, it’s the old advertising saying: I know half my ad spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half. So we’ve got that zone in this new paradigm. Well, listen, as we wrap things up, I always try to get a good sense of the person’s view of the future. I’d love for you to think about what is the utopian version of what you’re doing and where you see things going, and what is the dystopian version. So what’s one thing you’re hopeful about, and what are you concerned about? And you can reverse that. I try to end on the hopeful thing, but you go ahead.
[35:13] Choy Travers
Okay, yeah. So I think the bad version, or the dystopian version of the future, is none of this gets built, none of it gets allowed. Maybe a handful of publishers, in the scheme of things, are able to license content, but everyone else hollows out and a lot of publishers die out as well, and the world gets overtaken with AI slop only. I don’t think that’s actually going to happen. I think that’s the worst-case scenario. Best-case scenario is not only does ad injection work, and of course Oasy becomes the advertising layer for the open web, but the AI companies actually formalize a standard allowing publishers to do this, to advertise within AI. It becomes a legitimate channel and everyone’s happy. That’s it.
[36:09] Pete Pachal
Nice. We’ll leave it there. Choy Travers, thanks so much for dropping by, sharing your thoughts and the innovative tech you’re working on.
[36:16] Choy Travers
Thanks very much. It’s been great to be here.
