Perplexity blocks Time’s ads being served to AI agents
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Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’
By Sara Guaglione • August 11, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
Time is selling ads to AI agents. Perplexity refuses to let them work.
Less than two weeks after Digiday reported that Time had started serving ads inside the markdown versions of its webpages, aimed at AI agents rather than human readers, Perplexity confirmed that it blocked those ads from influencing its own search index.
In an emailed statement to Digiday, Perplexity’s chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer said the company works "continuously" to protect users from deceptive practices, sponsored or not, and warned that publishers who deploy "deceptive advertising like markdown ads" risk a reputational downgrade in Perplexity’s proprietary search index, including a hit to their trust score.
Perplexity did not respond to questions about how the AI company is defining “deceptive” practices or advertising — or how they are logistically blocking Time’s ads.
Time did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not clear if the deals Time signed with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute, early buyers, will be changed. Time’s sales team was already pitching agent ads to brands that had converted their own corporate sites to markdown.
Perplexity has blocked all markdown advertising on Time.com from influencing its agents or user-facing agents since the practice was first reported. The company’s search and security teams are also working on other solutions to protect its users from markdown ads more broadly, Digiday has learned.
It’s unclear how Perplexity is able to block Time’s markdown ads, but it’s the latest move in an evolving agentic advertising ecosystem.
Steven Liss, co-founder of AI native advertising platform OpenAds.AI, said it could be as simple as Perplexity instructing its agents to not retrieve advertising or irrelevant information from Time’s website. In the short term, that would mean sponsored content would not appear in Perplexity’s search results, he said.
Perplexity’s move also answers a question Time’s own executives had left open. When Time chief operating officer Mark Howard and Mobian co-founder and CEO Jonah Goodhart described the ad product to Digiday, both said it was too early to know how AI search engines would treat ads baked into markdown pages.
"We don’t know yet because this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here," Howard said at the time.
It’s clear Perplexity will not treat these ads neutrally and it will not wait for an industry standard to act.
Goodhart said the response to the agentic ads has been “extremely positive” so far, based on conversations he’s had since their launch, though he did not provide numbers to illustrate this success.
“A model forming an answer gets current, sourced, brand-verified information at the moment it is consuming the page, and it can weigh that information and use it or not," Goodhart said. “I think over time the models will want factual information available about the brands that matter to their consumers, so it is a bit perplexing why [Perplexity] would block that content. I can’t speak to how their model works, but I know that when models get facts wrong about brands, the people asking the questions get worse answers… Our view is that the most accurate, most real-time facts will win consumer trust over time.”
The ads work by having ad tech firm Mobian generate FAQ-formatted content based on a brand brief, then insert it into Time’s markdown pages and track how often AI search engines surface it, and how favorably. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had their brand-written, brand-approved messaging sit in the same markdown version of the page an agent reads as fact. If a page’s markdown version can be quietly seeded with paid content, users have no way of knowing whether an answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief, appears Perplexity’s logic.
That risk was flagged from the outset when these ads were made public.
Rob Derow, managing director and partner at BCG X, told Digiday at the time the original story was published that the biggest danger with markdown ads was the absence of any rule governing how LLMs treat them, and that AI search engines could eventually view the practice as a form of cloaking — the SEO tactic of showing crawlers different content than human visitors see. Time tried to get ahead of that by labeling its agent ads "sponsored content" at the top, even though no policy required it. Perplexity’s statement suggests the label didn’t matter. Its objection is to the practice, not the disclosure.
Analysts and execs in the AI advertising space...