Taboola's AI answer engine, DeeperDive, is expanding internationally, offering publishers a new way to retain readers on site amid evolving search habits, with notable adoption by USA Today and others across Asia and India.
Publishers are increasingly experimenting with AI tools that keep readers inside their own sites, as referral traffic from search engines becomes harder to rely on. Taboola is trying to ride that shift with DeeperDive, an AI answer engine that sits on publisher pages, fields reader questions and then points them towards relevant archive material and related coverage.
The product has begun spreading beyond its early adopters. According to Taboola, DeeperDive has been taken up by a number of publishers since its late-2025 launch and now supports six languages, with the company saying it reaches nearly 7 million monthly active users. USA Today, one of the first major outlets to deploy it, has seen more than 25 million questions since September, or roughly 1 million a week, while Taboola says publishers using the tool have recorded engagement rates of up to 17%.
USA Today’s product chief, Kara Chiles, said the company is still testing how audiences use the feature and is watching the types of prompts readers choose, especially where they are tied to what they are already reading or to fast-moving news. She said the publisher is treating the tool as a way to learn what audiences want more of, rather than as a simple search box replacement. Taboola founder and chief executive Adam Singolda has said the recirculation rate can exceed 10%, and the company argues that DeeperDive is proving readers will interact with clearly labelled AI features.
The rollout has not been uniform. Taboola said Reach is still in technical integration, despite earlier announcements that it would adopt the product, while HuffPost UK has recently added DeeperDive. Taboola has also been widening the pitch internationally, with press materials citing publishers such as India Today, BuzzFeed Asia and the Bangkok Post, as it tries to position the tool as a global publishing product rather than a narrow experiment for a few US newsrooms.
For Taboola, the AI push sits alongside its long-running recommendation business, which still underpins the company’s publisher relationships. Singolda has said those recommendation units remain central and that the company paid more than $1.5 billion to publishers last year. But with AI answer engines changing how people search and discover information, Taboola is betting that publishers will want a new layer of on-site discovery that can generate both audience data and advertising revenue.
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Source: Noah Wire Services