Well, that didn’t take long.
Less than two weeks after Time and Mobian announced an ad product that serves sponsored content specifically to AI agents visiting Time.com, Perplexity has said it’s blocking it. The AI search startup is also warning that publishers using the format could actually hurt their visibility on the AI search platform.
Perplexity’s chief communications officer told Digiday that these “markdown ads” were essentially “deceptive advertising,” and that Perplexity would work to “protect” users from them.
Why This Matters:
The idea here is to serve ads to AI bots (made-for-agents!) rather than people. Mobian inserts brand-approved content into the markdown version of Time.com pages, where AI agents can “encounter” it and, ideally, use it when generating answers.
That immediately raised concerns that brands could basically pay to covertly influence what AI platforms say about them, with the controversy quickly spilling beyond the ad industry and getting picked up by mainstream news outlets.
When Digiday first reported on Time’s work with Mobian, the big question was how AI platforms would respond. As we posted on X at the time:
Now, we have the first major AI search platform responding, and Perplexity isn’t just ignoring the ads. It’s blocking them and warning that the practice itself could hurt a publisher’s discoverability.
That’s potentially a much bigger problem for the model. If ChatGPT, Gemini and others adopt similar policies, publishers could face a pretty bad tradeoff: get paid to help agents see ads, but lose discoverability in the process (which ends up hurting the former, as well).
Experts React:
The discourse on this continues to rage on. Here are some interesting POVs from X:
Our Take:
There’s also something of an identity crisis happening here for Mobian.
The company previously set out to build a media verification business — a category that hinges on neutrality and being independent from the media transaction. Now, it’s working directly with a publisher to create and serve ads intended to influence what AI agents see.
Whatever prompted the shift, the result so far is blowback for Time, both reputationally and, if the practice continues, in its AI search visibility on at least one platform.
