Perplexity blocked the ads Time plants inside the markdown version of each page for AI agents to read, and said publishers running what it calls deceptive advertising risk a downgraded trust score in its index, according to Sara Guaglione at Digiday. Ad tech firm Mobian writes FAQ-style copy off a brand brief, seeds it into that markdown, and tracks which AI search engines pick it up and how warmly, with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute buying first. Time marks the placements as sponsored at the top of the page even though no rule requires it, but that label falls away once an agent ingests the text, and Perplexity is objecting to the practice rather than the disclosure. Perplexity wouldn’t explain what counts as deceptive or how the blocking works. I’ll admit, I enjoy the irony of Perplexity calling out anyone else for their “deceptive” practices.
