Axios and Every rebuild news for AI agents, Wired reports

"AI agent audience" is the phrase publishers now use for a reader that never opens a web page. In Wired, Kate Taylor's examples run from Axios, which is building feeds for software agents, to Every, which now writes articles that a subscriber's agent can rebuild into a summary, a podcast or a short video.

Axios's product, Axios Direct, will eventually take the form of three separate feeds aimed at three types of customers. One gives agents access to Axios Pro Deals content on mergers and acquisitions. Another, expected to launch next year, is designed to train companies' in-house large language models. A third, also planned for next year, will be available to individual subscribers and deliver Axios journalism directly to their agents.

Every's approach is different. Writers try to include AI prompts in their articles so readers can test the ideas for themselves, and the resulting pieces are written so a subscriber's agent can rebuild them as a summary, a podcast or a short video.

Time has started selling ad space that only bots can see, according to Digiday. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute are among the first buyers, drawn by scarcity: AI bot impressions on authoritative content are rare, which gives marketers a chance to shape what an LLM retrieves when a user asks a question.

Weekly use of AI chatbots for news in the U.S. has stayed at 6%. Who pays publishers for the extra plumbing is the question the piece leaves hanging; the implicit reframe is that the AI vendor was never going to pay anyway, which leaves the advertiser.