Starting in late 2009, Pulse Asia was accused of publishing biased or inaccurate polling, and of having close ties with Benigno Aquino III, who was elected President of the Philippines in June 2010.

In 2000, co-founder Professor Emeritus Miranda did admit that a presidential adviser for the current administration had paid over 620,000 pesos to conduct an opinion survey of President Joseph Estrada at the time of his impeachment trial.

[4] In 2010, Sen. Richard Gordon sued Pulse Asia and Social Weather Stations, the other leading political polling firm, in connection with his poor showing in pre-election surveys in which he was listed as a candidate for president.

Since 2016, Pulse Asia was also tagged as a "propaganda tool" by several anti-Duterte organizations and newspaper columnists due to its regular release of surveys that seemed to improve the optics of the Duterte government amid on-going crises and social unrest resulting from corruption scandals and gross ineptitude.[editorializing].

Despite the controversy, however, Pulse Asia has regularly delivered its Ulat ng Bayan surveys, even if these showed high approval and trust ratings for Duterte among Filipinos.