Time put a sponsored-content label at the top of the page on its own initiative, and Perplexity's objection is to the tactic rather than to the disclosure: a reader of the answer an agent assembles from that markdown still cannot tell a publisher's journalism from a brief written by a client.
Perplexity has confirmed to Digiday that it stopped Time's advertising aimed at AI agents from shaping its own search index — less than two weeks after the tactic first became public. Time had begun placing ads inside the markdown renderings of its web pages, copy pitched at AI agents rather than at people reading the site. Since the practice came to light, no markdown ad on Time.com has influenced Perplexity's agents or the results its users are shown.
Jesse Dwyer, who heads communications at Perplexity, said in an emailed statement to Digiday that the company works constantly to keep users clear of misleading tactics, paid or not. A publisher that runs misleading advertising of that kind, markdown ads among it, could see its standing in Perplexity's own search index fall, its trust score included, he said.
The ads themselves are assembled by Mobian, an ad tech company, which turns a brief supplied by a brand into FAQ-form copy, drops it into Time's markdown pages and measures how often and how favorably it comes up in AI search engines. Messaging written and signed off by Ally Bank and by the Project Management Institute went into the markdown rendering of a page that an AI agent takes to be fact.
The hazard was flagged when the story first ran: Rob Derow, a managing director and partner at BCG X, told Digiday the greatest danger with such ads was that nothing dictates what large language models do with them, and that AI search engines might in time come to view the tactic as a variety of cloaking — the search-optimization trick of serving crawlers content that differs from what human visitors see.
Perplexity left unanswered what it counts as deceptive practices or advertising, and by what technical means it is shutting Time's ads out. Digiday also reports that the company's search and security teams are working on broader fixes to protect users from markdown ads generally.
The block settles what Time's own executives had left open. Describing the agent-ad product to Digiday, Time operations chief Mark Howard and Jonah Goodhart, Mobian's co-founder and chief executive, both said it was still too soon to tell what AI search engines would do with advertising placed inside markdown pages. Goodhart now calls it puzzling that Perplexity would block that brand content, saying he expects models to increasingly want factual information available about the brands their users care about. Time gave no reply when asked to comment, and whether its deals with the two early buyers will change is unclear.
People who analyze or run businesses in AI advertising told Digiday the choice came as no shock, while doubting it will hold back the build-out of advertising for the agentic web. Robert Webster, who founded TAU and was previously an executive at WPP, said companies will work out how to earn money from fresh inventory before the industry's standards arrive, and Shiv Gupta, founder of the training firm U of Digital, said rival developers of large language models might follow Perplexity in blocking publishers' agentic ads — partly to leave users' confidence and their organically generated AI search results undamaged, partly to keep control of how revenue is made on the platforms they own.