Taboola’s next act: an AI answer engine for publishers

The tool, called DeeperDive, is provided by content recommendation tech company Taboola, which claims it has onboarded “dozens” of publishers since the product launched in September 2025.

USA Today launched DeeperDive on its homepage and across its site in September. Since then, more than 25 million questions have been asked. That averages about 1 million questions per week, according to a spokesperson for USA Today Co. 

Kara Chiles, svp of product management at USA Today Co., said her team is still in the “experimentation phase” with DeeperDive and is determining how audiences are using the product. Chiles said people are especially engaging with DeeperDive from the suggested prompts, particularly when those prompts are specific to content that person is reading or related to trending topics.

DeeperDive is also proving that USA Today readers are comfortable with using site features clearly labeled as AI-powered, Chiles said.

And while Chiles declined to share how much money USA Today has made from DeeperDive ads, she said the revenue and positive engagement rates spurred the decision to roll it out across its site after testing it with about 1% of its audience last summer.

But Chiles noted DeeperDive will not replace USA Today’s traditional site search, which helps visitors find something specific. The chat bar’s purpose is to encourage a dialogue and offer a dive deeper into a topic, she said.

For this reason, Chiles isn’t looking at click-through rates as a primary success metric, but will instead focus on tracking the number of questions asked in the AI answer engine and interest in certain content categories, as signals of where audiences want more coverage. (The likelihood that a DeeperDive user will click on another article surfaced in the product — or the recirculation rate — is over 10%, according to Taboola CEO Adam Singolda.)

“It’s a different way to think about discoverability,” Chiles said. “It’s a way for us to realize that, with all of the different avenues for people to consume content, how can we learn how to make this a satisfying place for them to spend time, in terms of going deeper into a specific topic? And how does that also suggest where they need to go next?”

For years, recommendation units from Taboola and Outbrain have been a pragmatic, if sometimes awkward, staple of publisher monetization – delivering dependable incremental revenue from remnant inventory even as questions lingered over user experience and brand fit. 

Singolda said those recommendation units remain Taboola’s core product, noting that the company paid over $1.5 billion to publishers last year. But like all companies, they too are having to adapt to the changes in user behavior spurred by the arrival of AI answer engines like ChatGPT. 

Several publishers are working on enhancing their websites this year with AI-powered formats and tools. Some have already added generative AI to their onsite search functions, either by using third-party tools like ProRata’s AI-powered search engine Gist or by building their own, such as Forbes’ Adelaide.

However, the rollout has been slower for some publishers. Reach announced it was adding DeeperDive to its sites in February, but Digiday couldn’t find the unit live on its pages. A Taboola spokesperson said Reach was still in the “technical integration stage.”

HuffPost UK added DeeperDive to its site this month. The publisher did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

DeeperDive is free to add, and publishers get a share of revenue from ads placed alongside the AI-generated answers. DeeperDive shows suggested prompts in the text box, based on a user’s browsing history (which is gathered from website cookies on the 9,000 publishers that are Taboola clients). 

Adding those “For You” prompts took the adoption of DeeperDive from less than 1% to 15-20%, according to Singolda. Publishers that have added DeeperDive to their sites are seeing up to one in six visitors use it, he added. 

DeeperDive’s ad unit has the highest conversion rates of all Taboola ad placements, Singolda claimed though he declined to share the conversion rate. He also declined to disclose how much ad revenue DeeperDive ads have generated, or how much of that ad revenue Taboola keeps (though he did point to the company’s 35% margin in its earnings reports). DeeperDive advertisers include Homes.com, Tripadvisor, Philips Home Appliances, NerdWallet and Motley Fool.

DeeperDive is part of what appears to be Taboola’s larger pivot toward AI products. Last week, the tech company announced the launch of Realize+, an agentic layer on its performance marketing platform to automate budget allocation and creative optimization.