The next ad market is being built for machines. Fast Company tested Oasy.
Fast Company named Oasy as one of the companies building the next ad market: advertising built for machines rather than people. A journalist tested our product. And the piece raised the hard question every company in this category has to answer: how do you monetise AI traffic without breaking trust?
Fast Company published a piece by Pete Pachal on what he calls the next ad market: advertising built for machines rather than people. It is one of the clearest explanations yet of a shift we have been building around for over a year.
Oasy is named in it, and Fast Company tested the product.
For publishers, bots have mostly been treated as a threat. They crawl content, extract value, and send little or nothing back. As bot activity grows and referral traffic falls, many publishers have responded the only way that seems to make sense: block as many as they can.
That reaction is understandable.
It is also not the only option.
If AI systems are becoming a new audience for publisher content, blocking, licensing, or waiting for the old traffic model to return does not answer the real question:
How do you monetise that audience?
That is the question Oasy was built to answer.
First, the easy part.
Pachal did not just describe what we do. He tested it, and confirmed our software gives publishers a clear count of the bots hitting their pages and the ad impressions served against them.
Good.
But we will be honest about what that is: the easy part.
Plenty of tools can now show a publisher their bot traffic. Seeing the bots is table stakes. It is the entry ticket, not the product.
The hard part is what comes next.
Anyone can tell you the bots are there. The question that matters is whether you can get paid for them.
Why the machine audience matters.
The old web ran on a simple exchange:
AI breaks that pattern.
In AI search and agentic systems, the human is often no longer the first reader. Bots retrieve, summarise, compare, and decide what makes it into the answer. As Fast Company puts it, the human may still be the ultimate reader, but the bot is increasingly the intermediary, and may make the first cut.
That changes what advertising has to be.
If the machine reads before the human does, advertising cannot only be designed for human pageviews. It also has to be understandable to the systems deciding what information travels forward.
“More aggressive.” We'll take it.
Fast Company calls our approach “more aggressive” than Time's bot-ad experiment: our technology inserts an advertiser message intended for the bot that a human reader does not see.
We understand the framing.
We just see it differently.
This is not about hiding advertising from people.
It is about recognising that publishers now have two audiences.
Publishers should be able to monetise both.
In a market where many publishers have responded to AI by blocking the door and hoping the old web comes back, being called aggressive about monetising the new audience is a compliment.
We'll take it.
Because the aggressive move is not serving ads to bots.
The aggressive move is pretending publishers should keep giving their machine audience away for free.
Trust.
Fast Company also raises the real objection: if a message is written for the bot and not shown to the human reader, could AI companies treat it as cloaking, or as an attempt to manipulate what the machine retrieves?
It is a fair question.
And any company building in this category should be able to answer it.
Our view is simple:
A site secretly shows one page to a search engine or AI system and a different one to the human — without the publisher, the platform, or the reader ever agreeing to it. The whole point is that nobody in the loop is supposed to know.
The publisher owns the page. They approve the advertisers. They see exactly what is served. Nothing goes in behind their back — it is the same principle that has governed sponsored content on the human web for years, applied to a new audience.
“Every message we place is approved by the publisher. The publisher controls what can appear on their pages, approves the advertisers, and sees exactly what is served. Nothing goes in behind their back.
The content is commercial. It is sanctioned by the owner of the page. And it follows the same basic principle that has governed sponsored content on the human web for years: publishers decide what commercial messages run on their own property.
The genuinely open question is disclosure.
How does an AI system, and the human at the end of the chain, know when part of an answer was commercially informed?
No standard for that exists yet.
We think one should.
And we would rather help build it now than wait for it to be defined without publishers in the room.
Where Oasy comes in.
Oasy is building the advertising layer for the agentic web, and publishers can start now.
Connect your domain once, and yes, you will see how agents are visiting your site.
But that is where most tools stop — and where we start.
You get publisher-approved advertiser messaging, built to be picked up by bots and carried into AI answers, with full control, full visibility, and no personal data collected.
The audience you are currently blocking becomes a revenue line.
And you move before the standards harden, while there is still room to shape how this market works rather than inherit whatever gets built without you.
Fast Company called it the next ad market.
We agree.
But for that market to last, it has to answer the hard questions from the start: measurement, disclosure, publisher control, advertiser value, and trust.
That is what we are building.
Sitting on bot traffic you don't earn from?
If you are a publisher with bot traffic you do not yet earn from, or a brand trying to show up inside AI answers, book a call. The publishers who move first will help define this channel. Better to shape it than inherit it.
Source: Pete Pachal, “The next ad market may be built for machines”, Fast Company.
Choy is the co-founder of Oasy.ai, with extended experience in AI Advertising and Publisher Monetisation.
