Reach plc, the parent company of major publications Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Liverpool Echo, and OK!, will tap into Taboola’s GenAI answer engine directly on its publisher websites.
Taboola is a native advertising and content discovery platform that recommends content, products and services within publisher articles through pay-per-click ads and sponsored links.
The company’s GenAI answer engine called DeeperDive, will let Reach readers ask questions and get conversational responses in-return, all within its publisher websites.
DeeperDive for Reach will tap into the company’s proprietary content created by its own journalists and editors, essentially operating as a bespoke content answer engine.
“DeeperDive gives us the ability to continue that focus, giving readers the ability to learn more and explore topics they care about,” explained Terry Hornsby, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Reach PLC.
The tool also gives suggestions of questions that might be of interest to readers from real-time trends and user activity currently surfacing.
Unlike traditional AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude, which taps into static data, Taboola says its DeeperDive tool understands what people are actively reading and engaging with.
Unlocking a New Revenue Stream for Publishers?
In a statement, Taboola outlined that DeeperDive has the power to reveal high-intent ad revenue for publishers – through inserting ads into the AI results page, and increase reader engagement – through keeping users on the publisher website for longer.
“We’re creating a new user habit, one where readers lean in, ask follow-up questions, and stay to explore. We’re also giving publishers the potential to unlock even more ways to grow,” Hornsby continued.
Publishers are facing numerous challenges because of AI – from publisher content being scraped without permission to surface in query responses, to users turning to AI tools for information over coming to publisher websites.
This has caused publisher traffic to drop dramatically. The Daily Mail reported that its advertising revenue dropped 15 percent compared to the year before, widely because of Google’s AI Overviews, which summarises query findings at the top of a Google search results page.
