By Sara Guaglione
Publication Date: 2026-08-11 04:01:00
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…
