Newsweek is building an AI Mode-like experience to customize homepages for readers

The homepage will be designed to be customized to each user, not just those logged into the site. Visitors will be greeted with local weather, a news briefing summary and stocks, based on their geolocation. The homepage is still in development and likely won’t be ready until next spring at the earliest, Krish said. Newsweek is currently conducting audience research on it. (“We don’t want to assume that [this is] what everybody wants,” he said.)

Newsweek’s AI assistant will be front and center — allowing users to ask questions, with suggested prompts to ask about the news of the day or specific information about certain topics. 

So far, most publisher-built AI assistants are walled gardens by design, pulling mostly from their own content. Newsweek wants to test beyond this capability, not just mining its own archive but pulling in citations from the wider web. The publisher is working with Google to figure out how to use its SERP API to include trending content, as well as Wikipedia and other public content. It remains unclear how Newsweek will cite those external sources. The financial agreement between the parties was not made clear.

“We didn’t want to build another chatbot,” Krish said. “Our homepage gets around 4% of [our] traffic, which has been stagnant for a while. So it’s a perfect place to experiment. We can’t do worse than that, we can only do better to provide a good experience.”

It’s one of many AI initiatives Newsweek is building in partnership with Google Cloud and powered by its AI system Gemini (it’s not through a content licensing agreement with Google, Krish noted).

“[The] homepage is good grounds for experimentation to try and build a return destination for consumers. Very few homepages are well trafficked,” said Burhan Hamid, co-founder of AI video ad platform streamr.ai and former CTO at Time. Building a homepage in the style of AI Mode would work well for a publisher with a large archive that is trying to find ways to surface content with the help of AI to drive engagement — as long as there’s enough demand for that content and the AI experience, he added.

Building personalized homepages

In a demo of the current site design given to Digiday, an AI-powered “Recommended for You” section appears on the right side, and suggested articles based on what the user has previously read on Newsweek’s site. There are several tabs below the AI assistant bar, including Newsweek’s rankings, events and a video tab. Users will also be able to listen to Newsweek’s homepage content through its AI voice integration.

Publishers have added more personalized elements to their homepages for years, to improve content curation and audience engagement. Adding in more intelligent personalization with AI is likely the next step for many. “The personalization angle is compelling, especially if users are arriving from broader AI chat environments and see their interests reflected immediately,” said Mark Wahl, vp of technology and innovation, at ad agency White64. One consideration will be how publishers like Newsweek navigate privacy regulations, especially since people may share more personal inputs in AI-powered search bars compared to traditional site browsing, he added.

Newsweek hasn’t yet determined which AI features will only be available for paying subscribers. Newsweek has about 40,000 subscribers and 2.5 million registered users, according to Krish. One idea is to release the AI and personalization tools to subscribers first — but that’s also a cost consideration. Allowing all of Newsweek’s site visitors (about 80 million monthly visitors, according to Similarweb data) to use these AI tools would cost a fair amount, Krish said, though Google Cloud is absorbing some of that cost. Krish declined to share more details on the cost breakdown.

Publishers are increasingly building AI-driven assistants and search tools into their sites, not just to keep readers around for longer, but to recreate the answer-style experiences people are starting to get from AI search, on their own turf. The Washington Post launched an “Ask The Post AI” feature last year. Time’s AI agent, which debuted last month, similarly lets readers ask questions and interact with Time’s content. The difference, though, is that Time’s AI agent isn’t personalized to users (although the publisher is working on launching a logged-in experience later this year). And it doesn’t pull content from other sources beyond Time’s archive.

Wahl said he is optimistic that chat-based interfaces can create new ways to navigate content and drive more meaningful engagement, but doesn’t believe that alone solves the traffic acquisition problem. “Engagement and acquisition remain separate challenges,” he said.

Here are some other AI-powered features Newsweek is building:

• An “Ask Newsweek AI” bubble to appear at the bottom of each article page, pegged to roll out by the end of this year. (One main hurdle right now is that none of the data can be cached so the AI system has to process information in real time — it’s currently taking 5 seconds, and the Newsweek team is trying to reduce that number to get closer to the milliseconds it takes for an article page to load, Krish said.) 
• AI-generated article translations, and an AI-powered filter of Newsweek’s rankings will launch by the end of the year. 
• Newsweek is also building its own content ranking algorithm (inspired by Google’s search ranking and TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, for example) that will take into consideration five metrics, such as new content, relevance, novelty of the content, and top Newsweek voices.

All of this is possible because of Newsweek’s August website redesign, which rebuilt its tech stack and overall look and feel. The overhaul gave the publisher the chance to modernize the site and lay a stronger foundation for navigating AI and search-driven challenges for publishers reliant on referral traffic. Google still makes up about 50 to 60% of Newsweek’s traffic, according to Krish.

“There’s an opportunity to build more scale, for sure, but also build a portfolio of products, so we can diversify, reduce the risk on the company, and then grow direct interaction with the user,” Krish said.

Newsweek built a new design system called Narrative to revamp the site, with a framework of design elements to use across digital platforms. Since the redesign, Newsweek signed a seven-figure advertising campaign with Apple, which Krish called “validation” for the design upgrade.

Meanwhile, the AI-powered content recommendation section increased clickthrough by 20%, according to Krish — especially critical given how AI tools are chipping away at publishers’ clickthroughs. Onsite searches increased over 1,500%, from 30,000 to 500,000 per month. Article recirculation increased 30%.

“What that showed us was, if you give people a really good product that’s an AI personalizing their needs, they’re willing to stay longer and do more with it,” Krish said.