{"slug": "perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive", "title": "Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’", "summary": "Perplexity has blocked Time's markdown ads from influencing its search index, calling them 'deceptive advertising,' less than two weeks after Time began serving ads to AI agents. Perplexity's chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer warned that publishers using such ads risk a reputational downgrade in Perplexity's proprietary search index, including a hit to their trust score. Time did not respond to a request for comment, and it is unclear if deals with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute will be affected.", "body_md": "Join us Sept. 14-18 in Miami to connect with top publishing leaders\n\n[SECURE YOUR SEAT](https://digiday.com/events/digiday-publishing-summit-sep-26/?source=display&utm-source=display)\n\n# Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’\n\nTime is selling ads to AI agents. Perplexity refuses to let them work.\n\nLess than two weeks after Digiday reported that Time [had started serving ads](https://digiday.com/media/time-has-started-serving-ads-to-ai-agents/) 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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nPerplexity 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.\n\nTime did not respond to a request for comment.\n\nIt’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.\n\nPerplexity 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.\n\nIt’s unclear how Perplexity is able to block Time’s markdown ads, but it’s the latest move in an evolving agentic advertising ecosystem.\n\nSteven 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.\n\nPerplexity’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.\n\n“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.\n\nIt’s clear Perplexity will not treat these ads neutrally and it will not wait for an industry standard to act.\n\nGoodhart 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.\n\n“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.”\n\nThe 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.\n\nThat risk was flagged from the outset when these ads were made public.\n\nRob 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.\n\nAnalysts and execs in the AI advertising space told Digiday they weren’t surprised by Perplexity’s decision, but also expressed that the move was unlikely to deter the evolution of advertising for the agentic web.\n\nThe internet is starting to split into two tracks, with content and advertising designed for humans as well as for AI agents, said Robert Webster, former WPP exec and founder of AI marketing consultancy TAU. Companies will find ways to monetize new inventory before standards catch up, he said.\n\nPerplexity’s decision is consistent with the discomfort AI companies have historically had with advertising, Liss said. He speculated that Perplexity’s stance risks driving publishers to block Perplexity’s crawlers — if publishers hit roadblocks in their attempts to monetize Perplexity’s bot traffic, then the value of that traffic remains unclear.\n\nShiv Gupta, founder of staff-training service U of Digital, noted that other LLMs may follow in Perplexity’s footsteps to block publishers’ agentic ads, to protect user trust and organic AI search results — as well maintain control over how their platforms are being monetized.\n\n“The intention may not be to deceive, but a promotional claim can end up cited as a neutral fact once the ‘sponsored’ label is left behind [when an AI agent retrieves the content],” Webster said. “Perplexity will also be keen to preserve their user’s trust that the answer it delivered wasn’t bought.”\n\n### More in Media\n\n####\n[\nMeet the interior design creator who made a reluctant pivot that paid off ](https://digiday.com/media/meet-the-interior-design-creator-who-made-a-reluctant-pivot-that-paid-off/)\n\nJulie Sousa had an interior design company and viral content, but after hiring a manager, was pressured to pivot. It worked.\n\n####\n[\nWhy brands like Gap Inc. and Staples are inviting their employees to be creators ](https://digiday.com/media/why-brands-like-gap-inc-and-staples-are-inviting-their-employees-to-be-creators/)\n\nCompanies are scrambling for creators. Turns out they already employ them.\n\n####\n[\nMedia Briefing: The case for and against markdown for AI bots ](https://digiday.com/media/media-briefing-the-case-for-and-against-markdown-for-ai-bots/)\n\nMarkdown is becoming publishers’ latest AI optimization tactic, raising questions about the scraping tradeoff.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive", "canonical_source": "https://digiday.com/media/perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive/?utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=general-rss", "published_at": "2026-08-11 04:01:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-11 04:15:17.196991+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-policy", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Perplexity", "Time", "Jesse Dwyer", "Ally Bank", "Project Management Institute", "OpenAds.AI", "Steven Liss", "Mark Howard"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive.jsonld"}}