Many AI companies will adopt advertising says ad chief

Criteo's ad chief predicts that many AI platforms will adopt advertising as a revenue model, noting that investors are pressuring these services to find profitable monetisation pathways. For website owners, this shift means a surge of AI‑generated traffic that will be deliberately routed through ad‑driven AI interfaces. Expect higher volumes of bot visits from AI chat and image generators that embed ad placements, which can inflate pageview metrics and skew audience analytics. Moreover, AI platforms may start scraping site content to personalise ads, raising concerns about copyright compliance and brand safety. **Actionable tips:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** to explicitly list AI bots that are allowed to crawl and those that must be blocked, using the new “advertising‑bot” directive to prevent unwanted ad‑related scrapers. 2. **Deploy real‑time bot detection** (e.g., behavioural fingerprinting) that flags traffic originating from known AI advertising SDKs, allowing you to filter or rate‑limit these visits in your analytics dashboard. 3. **Monitor ad revenue anomalies** by cross‑referencing server logs with llms.txt directives; spikes in impressions from AI‑identified user‑agents should trigger a manual review to ensure ad fraud isn’t inflating your earnings.