With the enhancement of high-throughput screening (HTS) for target-based antiretroviral discovery, fluorescence has been considered the best bioassay. Bioluminescence by genetic reporters has maintained a major place among cell-based virological assay formats. Luminescent bioassays have a wide variety of applications due to their high sensitivity and linearity, even for a range of complex biological samples. In this target-based method, we used an HTS bioluminescence assay and highlighted the detection capabilities of this time-of-addition experiment. Hence, the development of a cell-based assay that uses a phenotypic drug discovery approach based on bioluminescence by stable reporter cells is described. Utilizing this screening method, a bioluminescent, target-based, time-of-addition experiment was performed by adding antiretrovirals with known mechanisms of action to analyze their drug targets by measuring the length of time until the antiretrovirals lost their efficacy in an HIV-1 replication assay. Depending on the viral replication target, the antiretrovirals lost activity at different times: fusion inhibitors acted for 0-2 h; retrotranscriptase inhibitors acted efficiently for the first 4 h; integrase inhibitors acted for 18 h; and protease inhibitors were inactivated after 15 h. The target-based, bioluminescence assay identifies the mode of action of antiretroviral drugs and provides valuable information about drug targets that inhibit HIV replication. This assay delimits the time (hours) for which the addition of an antiviral can be delayed before losing its antiviral activity relative to the replication cycle of HIV. The target of an antiviral compound can be identified both by comparing the relative time until it loses efficacy to that of the reference drugs and by the time elapsed when the antiretroviral loses activity compared to a known control. Our target-based bioluminescence assay is fast, reliable, sensitive and useful for highthroughput drug screening.