Perplexity has blocked the ads Time embeds in the markdown versions of its pages (the versions AI agents read rather than humans) from influencing its own search index. Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s chief communications officer, said the company works “continuously” to protect users from deceptive practices, sponsored or not, and warned that publishers deploying “deceptive advertising like markdown ads” risk a reputational downgrade in its proprietary search index, including a hit to their trust score. Perplexity did not answer questions about how it defines “deceptive,” or about how the blocking works.
The ads are built by ad tech firm Mobian, which 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 and the Project Management Institute were early buyers, their brand-approved messaging sitting in the same markdown page an agent reads as fact. Time labeled the ads “sponsored content” at the top even though no policy required it. Perplexity’s objection is to the practice rather than the disclosure.
Time chief operating officer Mark Howard and Mobian co-founder and CEO Jonah Goodhart had 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. Goodhart says the response has been “extremely positive” based on conversations since launch, though he did not provide numbers, and he admits that he finds the block hard to follow: “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.” One thing that’s not perplexing is the intentional word choice there.
Rob Derow, managing director and partner at BCG X, had flagged the risk when the ads first became public — no rule governs how LLMs treat them, and AI search engines could come to view the practice as cloaking, the SEO tactic of showing crawlers different content than human visitors get. Steven Liss, co-founder of OpenAds.AI, said Perplexity’s stance risks pushing publishers to block its crawlers in return. Still, Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital, expects other LLMs to follow.
Read more at Digiday.