The bots are reading The Hub · ↗ thehub.ca
A Canadian policy publication is turning LLM citations into an advertising product.
The Hub is an unusually AI-forward Canadian politics and public policy publication (serving up mainly commentary and analysis, but some reported news as well). I’ve actually written about them before in the context of Newsbox, their AI publishing tool launched early this year.
They recently released a piece touting how they are ahead of every Canadian publication but one on AI citations for policy questions. While it is reasonable to be skeptical of this result given that this is an “internal study of 557 AI answers on four Canadian policy issues” (with the questions not released), it is interesting to see how much they are leaning into being a publication consumed not just by human beings, but by AI agents. It’s not yet clear how you monetize bot traffic, but I think the point of the piece comes at the bottom:
The Hub is now offering its advertising clients detailed tracking on LLM citations of their campaign content on a per-model and per-issue basis as a standard service, an industry first in Canada.
The analysis is itself the product, an add-on to their traditional online advertising offerings.