Exclusive: Taboola launches gen AI search engine for publishers called DeeperDive

Axios

a day ago

Ad giant Taboola is rolling out its own generative AI search engine called DeeperDive for its publishing partners to use on their websites, its CEO and founder Adam Singolda told Axios. Its debut publishing partners are Gannett/USA Today and The Independent.
Why it matters: With over 9,000 publishing partners, Taboola is one of the largest native advertising platforms serving the open web.
Singolda believes those existing relationships, and the insights gleaned from them, makes DeeperDive better equipped to answer user queries accurately.
Zoom in: DeeperDive is also designed with publisher monetization goals in mind, given that's how its existing business model operates.
It will surface links to relevant articles from across the publisher's site that a user encounters, with DeeperDive providing additional context to bolster engagement.
Singolda believes this can unlock new types of search advertising revenue for publishers, directly on their own websites.
Between the lines: As one of Taboola's first publishing partners, Gannett — which is the largest local newspaper company in America — sees an opportunity to use the new feature to expand its audience.
"We believe that will increase engagement significantly with the consumers we have today, and we will also broaden that audience of consumers we have today," said CEO Mike Reed.
Initially, the generative AI search engine widget will run only on Gannett's flagship national property, USA Today. "That'll be the beta 1% test of our audience, which is about 30,000 users per day," Reed said.
Eventually, Reed hopes to place DeeperDive on the websites of all of its 220 local news outlets.
How it works: DeeperDive pulls answers from Taboola's network of publishers to answer user queries. Those existing relationships mostly power the publishers' native advertising businesses.
DeeperDive will also soon begin to provide additional context and perspectives about the query, pulled from the same publisher site in which the user encountered the search engine.
That deeper context, pulled directly from sources on the site, is a large part of what differentiates DeeperDive from other AI search engines, Singolda said.
Reed noted that the additional context provided by DeeperDive will come from content published by USA Today and its network of local sites.
Zoom out: Several startups are trying to launch AI search engines in partnership with publishers, such as Perplexity and ProRata.AI.