AI search company Perplexity has begun preventing ads designed for AI bots on Time’s website from influencing its models, according to Digiday. Brands including Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had recently tested these ads, which are specifically designed to be read by AI bots. Perplexity warned publishers that running “deceptive advertising,” such as this new format, could result in them being downranked in its search index. The ads were intended to help companies leverage the “authority” of publishers like Time and improve their chances of appearing accurately inside chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. Jonah Goodhart, CEO of Mobian, said agent ads are clearly labeled and present cited, verifiable facts about brands. Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer said serving one page to people and a different page to software is called “cloaking,” which search engines have long penalized. “You can’t just rebrand spam,” Dwyer said. OpenAI and Google declined to comment, and Anthropic didn’t respond. Time COO Mark Howard said the publisher has contacted Perplexity and is looking forward to “a constructive dialogue about the standards and safeguards that will allow advertising and AI to develop responsibly together.” PMI CMO Menaka Gopinath described its AI ads experiment with Time as part of its “learning journey” to see how information surfaces in AI-driven environments.