• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 6, 2025

It may be difficult to wrap your head around a number like 1 billion, but that's the amount of search events Captify categorizes daily.

The company has built audience segments geared toward ad targeting for years, but recently added the ability to integrate those segments through Google Ad Manager, allowing publishers to understand the traffic coming to their sites even when the visitor is not logged in.

The Independent, Ranker, and Haymarket are some of the publishers using what the company calls the real-time audience enrichment tool. It offers publishers insights about their audience outside of owned properties, opening up monetization opportunities they might not otherwise have.

AI is driving the decline, but the integration allows publishers to bridge the gap between what they know about their own user base and their search activity across the open web. 

Its models classify users who click on publisher websites within seconds. The tool returns user classifications and matches them to taxonomy data, which means that when a publisher’s page loads and makes an ad call to Captify’s service, the technology can provide more data in real-time back to the publisher to support the ad request.

Mike Welch, CEO of Captify, said the company collects search events through its publisher partnerships -- about 3 million websites. The company then matches the IDs.

Captify can tell the publisher the intent of those visitors based on non-logged-in IDs.

Welsh said the big tech companies “soak up about 80% of the ad dollars AI lets users find the answers to without clicking to a publisher’s site. Those publishers are the lifeblood of the internet and programmatic business.”

If publishers see less traffic because of AI search and people get the answers they want without clicking on a link, not all can afford to cut deals. If more is done to enable those publishers to monetize their traffic to inform them about the intent of visitors that might not be logged in,' then we can help them understand more on how they can monetize at better rates and offset the loss of traffic.

Welch acknowledges that AI has the potential to threaten publishers that provide Captify data. AI has not threatened Captify’s business, but has put its “publisher partners on notice.”

He said publishers in general have seen website referral traffic decline and clicks are down. He can see it in Captify’s data.

The concept of the tool could also help retail media networks sell non-endemic audiences into their website, but it’s not what Captify focuses on today.

Today, the focus is on giving more information to publishers about advertising slots.

“There’s no reason why we can’t explore partnerships with ecommerce-based publishers because we can give them more information about users they cannot gain from their own data,” said Fraser Fruhauf, group product manager at Captify. “Some of the conversations I’ve had with publishers have been around what it might look like and the immediate next steps like how it could inform editorial content.”