{"id":900723,"date":"2026-04-21T18:12:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T23:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/21\/time-pitches-geo-insights-into-a-new-brand-offering\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T18:12:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T23:12:44","slug":"time-pitches-geo-insights-into-a-new-brand-offering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/21\/time-pitches-geo-insights-into-a-new-brand-offering\/","title":{"rendered":"Time pitches GEO insights into a new brand offering"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Sara Guaglione<\/a><\/span> \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 March 31, 2026<\/span> \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n Ivy Liu <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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This article is part of Digiday\u2019s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

Time is taking what it\u2019s learned about where AI search engines pull information and when Time shows up in those summaries to sell a new GEO product for brands.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the first to do so. Other publishers like Forbes and Future see the opportunity<\/a> in converting their AI visibility insights into a product they can sell to brands \u2014\u00a0Future is already selling its AI visibility tool<\/a>, called Future Optic, as part of branded content packages to clients to increase the volume of mentions and citations of their brands in AI search engines.<\/p>\n

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Time\u2019s GEO product differs in that it focuses on brand sentiment. Time is analyzing how AI search engines talk about a brand, pinpointing the potential mismatch between what a brand wants those AI summaries to say about it, and then selling Time-branded content to those brands to improve their messaging.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re starting to look at that \u2014 the difference between what a brand\u2019s advertising is trying to convey to the market about that brand, and the delta between what the AI answer platforms [say],\u201d Mark Howard, Time\u2019s chief operating officer, said onstage last week at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado.<\/p>\n

Time is using tools from companies like TollBit and ScalePost to track how the publisher is showing up in AI search and the topics and articles being cited and referenced \u2014 and where they\u2019re pulling information. While it\u2019s still a \u201cblack box\u201d and difficult to understand how answers are generated in these spaces, Howard believes Time has enough insights to sell this new product to brands, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Time is working with Mobian to analyze a brand\u2019s ads to pinpoint what a brand is saying about itself, including tone and sentiment, according to Howard. Then it cross-references that to what is being said about a brand across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, generating up to 100 different prompts and seeing how many different sources and URLs are cited in the answers by each platform. Then, Time scores how closely those answers match the brand\u2019s own positioning.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re showing [brands] this analysis, and we\u2019re saying, \u2018We can help you because of the domain authority of Time.\u2019 We show up on average, 30, 40, 50 million AI citations a month,\u201d Howard said.<\/p>\n

Mobian analyzed 750 brands and found that 17 percent of citations in AI search were either misaligned with the brand\u2019s positioning or factually inaccurate, according to Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Mobian.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe topics that are highlighted by AI are also not necessarily things that the brand wants to highlight,\u201d Goodhart said. He gave the example of a prompt in ChatGPT asking about a pharmaceutical company\u2019s allergy medication, and ChatGPT pulling from an article about the FDA considering placing a warning on COVID-19 vaccines. \u201cThis is sort of like a brand safety [and] suitability application to AI, in a sense,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Time then creates text and video-branded content to address those gaps to shape a brand\u2019s narrative in AI search. The content is published on Time\u2019s platform, as well as on other channels like YouTube, and the publisher tracks how often the branded content shows up in AI answers.<\/p>\n

Part of the strategy, Howard said, is that AI systems often pull from more obscure YouTube videos or websites.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did an analysis for a very large automotive company, and we actually showed them that there were more of these long-tail, under-1,000-subscriber YouTubers influencing their answers than their website and the content that they were publishing on their own website,\u201d Howard said. \u201cWe\u2019re now in a pretty active daily back and forth where they\u2019re just trying to really understand all this data that we prepared.\u201d<\/p>\n

Howard said he\u2019s spoken to several CMOs about the product, some of whom are actively working to improve their AI visibility \u2014 while others are unaware of their brand sentiment within AI summaries. He sees this as an education opportunity as well, and a way to spark conversations between Time\u2019s sales teams and prospective clients, Howard said.<\/p>\n

Howard declined to share how much Time is charging brands for its GEO service. \u201cThere\u2019s no silver bullet. If there was, I would be charging millions of dollars,\u201d said Howard.<\/p>\n

He said the product would fall under the same pricing packages of standard branded content, either as a complement to existing brand deals or as a separate product down the line \u2014 but with the potential for longer-term deals.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of branded content is done in a one-off. This is intended to be a little bit more strategic, to follow a longer-term strategy of consecutive releases, and whether we tackle one specific topic or identify multiple areas of having that delta \u2014 being able to follow that through over the course of a longer period. So it\u2019s intended to shift from that one-off to a more ongoing relationship,\u201d Howard said.<\/p>\n

Goodhart noted that it was unclear if AI systems were weighing branded content differently from pure editorial content, but having a brand associated with a \u201ccredible, trusted source\u201d ultimately mattered in AI visibility, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPhase two of this whole thing is, is it working? Is it changing how AI perceives the brand as a result of these efforts? And I think it\u2019s way too early to know. Also, the AI systems are all very rapidly changing, so we\u2019ll see over time,\u201d Goodhart said.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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\n More in Media<\/span>
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Sara Guaglione
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sara Guaglione \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 March 31, 2026 \u00a0\u2022 Ivy Liu This article is part of Digiday\u2019s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series \u2192 Time is taking what it\u2019s learned about where AI search engines pull information and when Time shows up in those summaries to sell a new GEO product for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":900724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23105,25539],"tags":[16469,5358],"class_list":{"0":"post-900723","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-insights","8":"category-pitches","9":"tag-insights","10":"tag-pitches"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}