AI news · People Inc. · AI agents
People Inc. builds custom APIs so AI agents skip its web pages
The publisher sends AI partners plain article text with author and dates, after Google referrals fell 70% in two years.
People Inc., the publisher of People and InStyle, wants AI agents to stop reading its web pages and take its articles from a data feed instead. Jon Roberts, its chief innovation officer, told Digiday’s Media Strategies London event that the company is building custom APIs (direct software connections) that hand AI partners the article text in Markdown, a plain text format, along with the author and the publication and update dates, Digiday reported on 2 November 2026.
Roberts says “90% of the content is junk meant for a browser to read” on an HTML page. It distracts an agent, and every token, the unit AI processing is billed in, costs money. People Inc.’s route to partners has moved twice: from crawling to files sent through Amazon S3 storage, which let it push updates and pull retracted stories, and now to the APIs.
The money behind the push came out on its third-quarter call on Tuesday 3 November. Google search referrals are down 70% over two years and core sessions fell 26% in the quarter, AdExchanger reports. Licensing revenue grew 49%, led by deals with news aggregators and AI vendors, among them Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. Revenue not tied to visits now makes up 43% of digital revenue.
Agent traffic is climbing fast: visits from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% in a year, Digiday notes from HUMAN’s 2026 report.
On our price sheet, web search comes with Claude’s $0 Free plan, our 8 November check.
Digiday describes the feed as access for AI partners, so the efficiency gain goes to licensees and the control stays with People Inc., while a free assistant with web search, like the one on Claude’s $0 plan on our sheet, gets them only if its maker holds a People Inc. deal.
Sources
- Digiday: People Inc. is building custom APIs to make its journalism easier for AI agents to use. Checked
- AdExchanger: With Search Traffic Down 70%, People Inc. Bets On Revenue Beyond Site Visits. Checked
Alexandre S.
Alexandre S. is a creative ad strategist and copywriter with ten years' experience in digital marketing across multiple channels.
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