---
title: Perplexity Is Blocking Time’s Ads Aimed at AI Agents, Calling Them Deceptive
description: Perplexity has blocked Time’s markdown ads aimed at AI agents, calling the practice deceptive, as publishers and AI-search platforms clash over the agent web.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-08-12T19:29:54.689Z
updated: 2026-08-12T19:29:54.697Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/perplexity-blocks-time-markdown-ads-ai-agents
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/ai-agent-markdown-ads-145641.webp
categories: Artificial Intelligence
content_type: News
region: Global
publication: Sovereign Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

Perplexity has blocked the ads Time aimed at AI agents, keeping them out of its own search index, and is calling the practice deceptive. Perplexity’s chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, said in an emailed statement that the company works "continuously" to protect users from deceptive practices, sponsored or not, according to Digiday. Dwyer 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 answer how it defines "deceptive," or how it is technically blocking the ads. Time did not respond to a request for comment. Steven Liss, co-founder of the ad platform OpenAds.AI, said the block could be as simple as Perplexity instructing its agents not to retrieve advertising or irrelevant information from Time’s site, meaning the sponsored content would not appear in Perplexity’s results for now.

## Time Turned Its Bot Traffic Into an Ad Product

Last month Time began converting its web pages from HTML into markdown, stripped-down, text-only copies that drop design and images so AI systems and agents can read them more easily and improve Time’s odds of surfacing in generative search results. Putting ads inside those pages became Time’s way of squeezing revenue from its growing bot traffic. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute were among the first buyers, and Time’s sales team was already pitching agent ads to other brands that had converted their own corporate sites to markdown.

The ad-tech firm Mobian makes the product. It generates FAQ-formatted content from a brand brief, inserts it into Time’s markdown pages, and tracks how often AI search engines surface it and how favorably. Ally Bank’s and the Project Management Institute’s brand-written, brand-approved messaging sat inside the same markdown version of a page that an agent reads as fact. Time labeled the material "sponsored content" at the top of the page, even though no policy required it. Perplexity’s objection is to the practice itself, not to whether it was disclosed.

## The Dispute Is Over Who Controls What Agents Read

Robert Webster, founder of the AI marketing consultancy TAU and a former WPP executive, said the internet is starting to split into two tracks, one for humans and one for AI agents, and that companies will keep finding ways to make money from the new inventory. Perplexity’s stated concern is narrower but pointed: if a page’s machine-readable version can be quietly seeded with paid content, a user has no way to know whether an agent’s answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief.

Rob Derow, managing director and partner at BCG X, had already warned that the biggest danger with markdown ads is the absence of any rule for how large language models are supposed to treat them, and that AI search engines could eventually treat the practice as "cloaking," the SEO tactic of showing crawlers different content than human visitors see. Perplexity’s search and security teams are now working on broader defenses against markdown ads, and the company has blocked all markdown advertising on Time.com from influencing its agents since the practice was first reported.

Not everyone in the trade sees a problem. Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Mobian, said the response to agent ads has been "extremely positive," though he gave no numbers, and called it "a bit perplexing why [Perplexity] would block that content." Goodhart argued that "the most accurate, most real-time facts will win consumer trust over time." It is not yet clear whether Time’s deals with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute will change because of the block.

## FAQ

**Q: Does this change what I see on Time.com as a human reader?**
No. Markdown ads sit in the stripped-down version of a page that AI systems read, not the normal page a person sees in a browser. The point is that humans and agents are served different versions of the same page.

**Q: Is Time the only publisher selling ads to AI agents?**
It is the first major publisher known to, but its sales team has been pitching the format to other brands that converted their sites to markdown, and people in the ad industry expect more publishers to follow as AI assistants take traffic away from search.

**Q: What is a Perplexity trust score, and what would a downgrade do?**
Perplexity ranks the sources in its own search index. Its communications chief said publishers who run markdown ads risk a reputational downgrade, including a hit to that score, which would make their content less likely to shape the answers Perplexity gives users.

**Q: Why would a brand pay for an ad only an AI agent will read?**
Because AI assistants increasingly answer questions directly instead of sending people to websites, so advertisers want their message in front of the agent that shapes the answer. Mobian argues models will want brand-verified facts; Perplexity argues readers cannot tell paid content from reporting.