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Information Quality Is What Wins In The AI Era

Recorded: Sept. 16, 2026, 2:40 p.m.

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Information Quality Is What Wins In The AI Era | AdExchanger

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Home AdExchanger Talks Information Quality Is What Wins In The AI Era

PODCAST: AdExchanger Talks
Information Quality Is What Wins In The AI Era By
Allison Schiff

Wednesday, September 16th, 2026 – 1:30 am
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A podcast interview with
Tim Frank
Corporate VP, Monetization, Commerce & AI economy,


Blocking bots might feel like the only leverage publishers have left.
But keeping them out by default is a bit like unplugging the phone when your customers are trying to reach you, says Tim Frank, corporate VP for monetization, commerce and the AI economy at Microsoft, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“A lot of businesses right now are intentionally blocking these types of agents and systems, and it’s important to know that this is a very fast-growing channel,” Frank says. “If you’re not available, then you’re never going to be found.”

Bot traffic surpassed human traffic on the web for the first time in June, according to Cloudflare, which maintains a live tracker of automated versus human HTTP requests distributed to HTML content. Between then and now, the share of search requests initiated by bots increased from 57.4% to 58.6%.

But letting the crawlers in isn’t a guarantee that they’ll recommend you. Frank has a phrase for it: “Information is the new bid.”
In the AI era, he says, the brands that get recommended won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest ad budgets, but rather those with the most clear, complete and transparent product data.
“Information quality matters a ton,” Frank says. “But I want to broaden the term information, [because] it’s not just what’s on a website.”
Agents get their information from multiple sources. They weigh a brand’s own claims against whatever they can get their hands on (if they had hands) – and they never get bored halfway through.
“For brands,” Frank says, “it’s not just their own narrative, it’s what do the reviews say? What are people saying in different forums? Agents triangulate this and it’s not only the brand’s message anymore.”
Which is why we’re starting to see more GEO and AEO startups come out of the woodwork. Some of them are slinging snake oil while others, to be fair, are just trying to roll with a rulebook that gets rewritten every few weeks.
But the cheapest and easiest way for brands to find out where they stand in AI search is almost anticlimactic in its simplicity: Just ask. Interview the models the way you’d interview humans in a focus group.
“Go ask each of the models why they’re doing what they’re doing,” Frank says. “It’s free research.”
Also in this episode: Why Frank is bullish on the Universal Commerce Protocol, tips for navigating the three eras of the internet (human, LLM and agentic) and Frank’s fascination with black holes and space, which led him to an early job building satellites.

For more articles featuring Tim Frank, click here.

Tagged in:

agentic AI

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AI search traffic

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bot traffic

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GEO

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microsoft

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Tim Frank

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Universal Commerce Protocol

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© 2026 Access Intelligence, LLC - All Rights Reserved

In the context of the evolving artificial intelligence era, the quality of information is paramount to success, as articulated by Tim Frank, Corporate VP for monetization, commerce, and the AI economy at Microsoft. While blocking bot traffic might seem like the sole leverage for publishers, Frank suggests that allowing agents access to information is inevitable, noting that if a publisher is not available, they will not be found. This trend is underscored by data from Cloudflare, which indicates that bot traffic surpassed human traffic on the web in June, and the share of search requests initiated by bots increased from fifty-seven point four percent to fifty-eight point six percent subsequently.

Frank posits that in this environment, "information is the new bid." He argues that the brands that achieve visibility in AI-driven search rankings will be those possessing the clearest, most complete, and most transparent product data, rather than those simply possessing the largest advertising budgets. Information quality is therefore critical, but Frank broadens this concept, emphasizing that it extends beyond what is explicitly present on a website. Agents aggregate information from diverse sources, weighing a brand’s own claims against external data gathered from various forums and sources, resulting in a triangulation of information that goes beyond the brand’s singular narrative.

To navigate this landscape, Frank suggests that brands should actively seek to understand how AI models arrive at their recommendations. He proposes a method for this exploration: directly questioning the models in a manner similar to conducting a human focus group. By asking each model to explain its rationale for specific recommendations, brands can perform free research to assess their standing in AI search. This approach helps address the complexities introduced by agentic systems, which are constantly synthesizing and evolving their understanding of brand value from multiple inputs.