The dream of serving ads to AI agents has hit a snag

Now the bots see them. Now they don’t.

Brands including Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute recently began testing ads on the publisher Time’s website, specifically designed to be read by AI bots.

The experiment sparked a lively ad industry debate: Could this nascent form of advertising grow into a credible channel, or would the practice be quickly thwarted by the AI platforms they are hoping to target?

AI search company Perplexity decided it doesn’t want to play ball.

Digiday reported that Perplexity has begun preventing these ads from influencing its models. In a statement, the company warned publishers that running “deceptive advertising,” such as this new format, could result in them being downranked in its search index.

A quick recap:

• Time recently created stripped-down, text-only versions of its webpages designed to be read by AI agents.
• Time is directing AI crawlers to read those pages rather than the ones humans see.
• It then began working with the adtech company Mobian to place “Agent Ads” on those pages.
• These ads render as blocks of FAQ-like text with up-to-date facts about the advertised brand.