Perplexity has blocked advertising placed in AI-readable versions of Time's webpages from influencing its search index, affecting an experiment that lets brands serve sponsored material directly to AI crawlers.
The AI search company confirmed the move after Time began placing ads inside markdown versions of its webpages intended for AI systems rather than human readers. Perplexity described the practice as deceptive advertising and warned that publishers using it risk a downgrade in its search index.
The ads appear in markdown versions of Time articles, which provide a simplified, text-based version of a webpage. The sponsored material is structured as frequently asked questions containing information supplied by advertisers and is labelled as sponsored content. It does not appear on the standard webpages viewed by Time readers.
Perplexity draws a line on AI-targeted ads
Perplexity has taken issue with serving its systems content that differs from what human visitors receive. The company confirmed that it had blocked Time's markdown ads from influencing its search index and agents.
Jesse Dwyer, a Perplexity spokesperson, described the practice as deceptive and said publishers using similar markdown advertising "risk reductions to their reputation and trust scores within Perplexity's search index."
Google defines cloaking as presenting different content to users and search engines with the intention of manipulating search rankings. Its spam policies also cover attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search. Google has not said that Time's advertising format violates those policies.
Mobian, the adtech company behind the format, has rejected Perplexity's characterisation. "The format gives AI systems access to current, brand-approved information, which the models can then decide whether to use," Jonah Goodhart, Mobian's CEO, told Digiday.
Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute (PMI) are among the brands testing the format. PMI's participation is intended to examine how information about the organisation appears in AI-driven environments, according to comments from CMO Menaka Gopinath reported by Business Insider.
AI platforms chart their own advertising routes
AI companies are also building their own systems for receiving commercial information. OpenAI allows merchants to submit structured product feeds containing details such as descriptions, images, prices, and reviews for use in ChatGPT product discovery. The company says ChatGPT selects product results independently and that those results remain separate from advertisements.
OpenAI began testing advertisements in ChatGPT in February 2026. The company says ads run separately from its chat model and do not influence answers.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau released an AI Transparency and Disclosure Framework in January 2026, setting out guidance when the use of AI materially affects the authenticity of advertising in ways that can mislead consumers. The framework does not specifically address advertising delivered to AI crawlers.
Perplexity's decision means that making sponsored material available to a crawler does not guarantee that the platform will index it or use it in user-facing responses. Other major AI providers have not publicly adopted the same position. Business Insider reported that OpenAI and Google declined to say whether they would take similar action.
Why this matters for marketers
Adobe Analytics found that digital AI sources to US retail sites increased 393% year on year between January and March 2026 - which makes the AI search channel increasingly difficult to ignore. But Perplexity's move shows that AI platforms are setting their own rules for what they will and won't ingest. A brand-approved placement that looks legitimate can still be filtered out if it diverges from what human visitors see.
Marketers testing or considering AI-crawler advertising should verify whether the platform's policy treats such placements as cloaking - and should watch for this orthodoxy spreading. The same applies to anyone building AI agents that rely on web content: Perplexity's approach signals a growing preference for consistency between what a bot reads and what a human sees.
For resource, Perplexity AI Courses covers how the platform's crawling and indexing work. Marketers looking to understand AI search and content distribution more broadly may want to explore AI for marketing training resources.
Your membership also unlocks:
