Before you start: understand your traffic
The first mistake publishers make is rushing to monetise before they understand their AI traffic. Spend a week in Observe mode. Look at:
- Which bots visit most? GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and GoogleBot (Gemini) have meaningfully different CPM profiles. A site heavily indexed by Perplexity will see different auction dynamics than one primarily crawled by OpenAI.
- Which pages get hit most? AI bots have a strong preference for evergreen how-to content, comparison pages, and in-depth guides over news and opinion. Your analytics will show this clearly.
- What IAB categories does your content fall into? Advertisers target by IAB category. If 60% of your AI traffic lands on IAB17 (Sports) content, your revenue will be driven by sports and fitness advertisers. Knowing this shapes your content strategy.
Setting up the integration
Blankspace operates at the CDN edge - specifically in the request/response cycle between an AI bot and your origin server. The integration is a lightweight edge worker (around 50 lines of JavaScript) deployed on Cloudflare Workers, Akamai EdgeWorkers, Fastly Compute, or AWS Lambda@Edge.
The worker does three things:
- Detects AI bot user agents against a continuously updated list maintained by Blankspace
- Calls the Blankspace auction API with the page URL, IAB category, and bot type - this happens in under 10ms at the edge
- Injects the winning brand fact into a specific location in the page HTML before it's returned to the bot
Human visitors are completely unaffected. The worker short-circuits before doing anything if the user agent doesn't match an AI bot.
Starting with observe mode
Every new Blankspace integration starts in Observe mode. In this mode, the edge worker detects and logs AI bot traffic but doesn't modify responses or enter auctions. This gives you:
- A baseline of your AI traffic volume and composition
- Confidence that the integration is working correctly
- Data to inform your monetisation strategy
We recommend spending three to seven days in Observe mode before switching pages to Monetise mode. Publishers who skip this step often underestimate their traffic and misconfigure their IAB categories.
Maximising your CPM
Not all AI traffic is equal. Some factors that increase your effective CPM:
Content specificity. A page comparing five specific running shoes earns more than a general "how to choose running shoes" page. Advertisers pay premiums for content where purchase intent is clear.
Page depth. Longer, more comprehensive pages attract more bot requests per crawl cycle. Thin content generates fewer impressions.
Category concentration. Sites with a clear IAB category profile (e.g., heavily sports-focused) attract more targeted advertiser bids than general-interest sites where advertisers can't predict which content will be served.
Traffic timing. AI bots tend to crawl recently updated content more frequently. Keeping evergreen pages fresh with new information increases crawl frequency and impression volume.
Thinking about brand safety
The per-page mode control in your dashboard lets you exclude specific pages or sections from monetisation. Use this for:
- Breaking news or ongoing crisis coverage where injected brand mentions would feel incongruous
- Opinion or editorial content where you want to preserve journalistic independence
- Any page where the content topic and potential advertisers might be misaligned
You can also set blocked category lists at the site level. If you run a health and wellness publication, you might block certain pharmaceutical or supplement advertisers by IAB subcategory.
The revenue trajectory
Publishers typically see a hockey-stick revenue curve. The first two weeks are low - your IAB categories need to accumulate auction history before advertisers start targeting you confidently. By week four, most publishers see CPMs stabilise at their natural level for their category mix. After three months, many publishers are earning more from AI traffic than from traditional programmatic on the same inventory.
The key metric to watch isn't raw revenue but CPM trend. If your CPM is rising week-over-week, it means more advertisers are targeting your categories and competition in your auctions is increasing. That's the dynamic you want.