{"id":3268,"date":"2026-08-12T16:37:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T16:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3268"},"modified":"2026-08-12T16:37:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T16:37:16","slug":"the-dream-of-serving-ads-to-ai-agents-has-hit-a-snag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3268","title":{"rendered":"The dream of serving ads to AI agents has hit a snag"},"content":{"rendered":"<section>\n<p>Now the bots see them. Now they don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Brands including Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute recently began testing ads on the publisher Time&#8217;s website, specifically designed to be read by AI bots.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3266\">OpenAI finds a crack in Anthropic\u2019s business AI lead<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The experiment sparked a lively ad industry debate: Could this nascent form of advertising grow into a credible channel, or would the practice be quickly thwarted by the AI platforms they are hoping to target?<\/p>\n<p>AI search company Perplexity decided it doesn&#8217;t want to play ball.<\/p>\n<p>Digiday reported that Perplexity has begun preventing these ads from influencing its models. In a statement, the company warned publishers that running &#8220;deceptive advertising,&#8221; such as this new format, could result in them being downranked in its search index.<\/p>\n<p>A quick recap: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Time recently created stripped-down, text-only versions of its webpages designed to be read by AI agents. <\/li>\n<li>Time is directing AI crawlers to read those pages rather than the ones humans see. <\/li>\n<li>It then began working with the adtech company Mobian to place &#8220;Agent Ads&#8221; on those pages. <\/li>\n<li>These ads render as blocks of FAQ-like text with up-to-date facts about the advertised brand.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The central idea is that the ads could help companies leverage the &#8220;authority&#8221; of publishers like Time and improve their chances of showing up accurately inside chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.<\/p>\n<p>Jonah Goodhart, CEO of Mobian, said agent ads are clearly labeled and present cited, verifiable facts about brands that models can choose whether to use.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is the opposite of deception,&#8221; Goodhart told me.<\/p>\n<p>Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer said that serving one page to people and a different page to their software is called &#8220;cloaking,&#8221; which search engines have long penalized.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3264\">The world\u2019s largest sovereign wealth fund revealed a $1.2 billion stake in SpaceX. Here\u2019s how much it holds of tech\u2019s biggest companies.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t just rebrand spam,&#8221; Dwyer told me. &#8220;If the ads are so helpful, why not just put them right on the site for everyone to see?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I also asked a few other prominent AI platforms whether they would follow Perplexity&#8217;s lead. OpenAI and Google declined to comment, and Anthropic didn&#8217;t respond.<\/p>\n<p>Time COO Mark Howard said in a statement that the publisher has contacted Perplexity and is looking forward to &#8220;a constructive dialogue about the standards and safeguards that will allow advertising and AI to develop responsibly together.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, PMI CMO Menaka Gopinath described its AI ads experiment with Time as part of its &#8220;learning journey&#8221; to see how information about project management, skills, and career development surfaces in AI-driven environments.<\/p>\n<p>Like many marketing experiments, sometimes it&#8217;s not all about the ROI, but the lessons we learn along the way!<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3261\">\u2018History is repeating\u2019: Michael Burry says it\u2019s time to read about Enron<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perplexity said ads designed to influence AI bots are &#8220;deceptive,&#8221; in response to a recent experiment from the publisher Time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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