By Sara Guaglione • August 11, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
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.
