People Inc. builds custom APIs so AI agents can read its journalism

Traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% year over year, according to HUMAN's 2026 State of AI Traffic report. That number explains why People Inc. is now building custom APIs to make its journalism machine-readable for AI partners, rather than letting agents crawl full webpages.

The shift strips out everything an agent does not need. Instead of forcing AI systems to parse entire HTML pages, People Inc. sends article text in Markdown along with key metadata — who wrote it, when it was published or updated, and other "trust signals that matter," according to Jon Roberts, the company'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," Roberts told delegates at Digiday's Media Strategies London event. "It will really distract the agent, and it will be incredibly expensive to process all these tokens that it doesn't need."

Why token cost drives the decision?

The economics are straightforward. Every token an AI system processes costs money, and HTML pages are padded with headers, scripts and layout code that agents never use.

"Every token that needs to be processed is expensive," Roberts said. "If you throw it the entire HTML header, that's abuse. Right, that's not reasonable."

People Inc. has moved through three distribution methods. It first gave partners access through web crawling, then through Amazon S3 buckets, which let the company send updates and retract content. Custom APIs are the third step, chosen because crawling is an inefficient way for AI systems to gather information.

The move also gives the publisher greater control over how its journalism reaches AI partners. Roberts said AI companies are beginning to recognize the importance of knowing when publishers created or updated content. People Inc. builds those details into its own AI tools first, then applies what it learns to partner offerings. The publisher is not focused on advertising directly to AI agents, he added.

What does the broader context look like?

The API push comes the same week People Inc. laid off about 6% of its workforce. The cuts underscore the pressure on publishers to find durable business models as AI reshapes how audiences discover and access journalism.

The urgency is not hypothetical. Publishers are already struggling to distinguish useful, customer-led agents from bots scraping their content.

"We need to act quickly on it because it's not going to be something in the future — it's happening now," Daily Mail director of SEO and editorial commerce Carly Steven said at the London event. "So that is a fairly urgent need that we all need to address and get our heads around."

Who else is adapting content for agents?

Publishers are testing different approaches to package their journalism for AI systems:

• The Economist is experimenting with making marketing and B2B sales material outside its paywall more easily readable for agents.
• Time has converted its pages from HTML to Markdown and has started selling ads to agents visiting its site.
• Forbes has created Markdown versions of its Vetted product reviews and an "MCP layer," while exploring separate presentations for agents and human readers.

Forbes' chief innovation officer, Nina Gould, said the approach could help the publisher reach people using AI tools. But she emphasized the strategy is still developing; a planned ChatGPT product-recommendation plugin has not yet gone live.

"On something like ads for agents, we're still working on that," Gould said.

For now, People Inc. is betting that structured, low-cost access beats letting agents fight through HTML — a bet other publishers will likely have to evaluate as agentic traffic keeps compounding.