alt Hacker NewsThis would be an interesting story, but I can’t replicate it. I used curl and set the User-agent, and I indeed got a markdown reply, but no ads.
Replies
nairboon • today at 4:43 PM
Maybe the bots already ate up Ally's Q3 campaign budget?
tclancy • today at 1:38 PM
Or they were so well targeted they didn’t even feel like ads. Dunh dun DUHN!
According to the article, its not like they inject direct ads in the article in markdown. But what's interesting is that they are serving content that is irrelevant to the article (in the article its the best inventions page) and it seems optimized to leave a good impression on LLM for an entity (Ally Bank in this case). They only serve that Ally Bank content on the LLM version of the page and don't mention it at all on their human page.
Maybe they are banking on LLMs including it in their training data while scrapping or something like that. It does track impressions so they are definitely up to something.