Microsoft's pitch: information is the new bid

Blocking AI agents by default is "a bit like unplugging the phone when your customers are trying to reach you," says Tim Frank, Microsoft's corporate VP for monetization, commerce and the AI economy, on this week's AdExchanger Talks. Bot traffic surpassed human traffic on the web for the first time in June, per Cloudflare, and the share of search requests initiated by bots has since ticked up from 57.4% to 58.6%. Frank's argument is that the brands and publishers that get recommended in the agentic era will not be the ones with the biggest ad budgets but the ones with the clearest, most complete, transparent data: "Information is the new bid." Agents triangulate a source's own claims against reviews, forums and everything else they can reach, so "it's not only the brand's message anymore." His practical advice is anticlimactic and cheap: "Go ask each of the models why they're doing what they're doing. It's free research." He is also bullish on the Universal Commerce Protocol as the future plumbing of the agentic web.

The crux

In the agentic web, discoverability is being won by information quality and machine-readable, citable content rather than ad budget, and a publisher that blocks AI agents forfeits a fast-growing referral and licensing channel entirely.

Sell-side read

Publishers hold exactly what Frank describes as scarce: the authoritative source content agents triangulate against. The play is to make that content structured and machine-readable, and to license it, rather than wall it off and vanish from the answer layer.

Watch

Whether "information as the new bid" turns into a formal, publisher-accessible marketplace like the Universal Commerce Protocol, or stays a slogan while the answer engines set the terms.