How to Get AI Agents to Recommend Your Articles

How do you know if a change to your AI workflow makes it better? In today’s piece, Every’s head of evals Mike Taylor puts AI’s taste in headlines to the test. This Thursday, October 29, from 1–2 p.m. ET, join him on Zoom for an introduction to DSPy, the framework at the heart of his new book, Context Engineering with DSPy.—Kate Lee

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“The newsletter is dead.”

Every CEO Dan Shipper posted that declaration on X last week—a bold thing to say when your company’s core business is a newsletter with more than 120,000 subscribers. But his point is that an email address no longer guarantees a relationship with a human reader. Persistent agents now filter Dan’s inbox so thoroughly that he almost never looks at his email. He’s not alone: People are still reading, but more and more of what they read will be chosen by an agent.

That makes the agent a new kind of reader, and one I realized we knew very little about at Every. I use AI for everything, but I rarely stop to ask what its preferences are, or why it recommended something to me. When Dan asked me, “@Mike Taylor think you could figure out how to make agents like articles more? Asking for a friend,” I set up an experiment to find out.