• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, 10 hours ago

Gannett on Wednesday launched a generative AI (GAI) engine to give readers real-time answers to questions on everything from sports highlights to financial news.

The tool, created by Taboola, will initially become available on one of the publisher's news sites, USA Today, and pull answers from content across Gannett’s network of publications.

It also will have access to Taboola’s more than 600 million daily active users and 9,000 publisher partners worldwide. Quality and performance will be monitored by people, not AI. 

The GAI engine can be considered a type of white box search engine for publishers that Taboola could license across the web. It is not clear whether the AI engine has checks and balances to identify misinformation or sites where the content comes from. It is also not clear whether the GAI engine can reason and analyze the available information to draw from and create its own conclusions.

USA Today reported that the engine should give its publisher a better understanding of which topics and stories interest readers most. 

While DeepDive is geared toward publishers, last week Taboola launched a Predictive Audiences tool for advertisers that can tie into the tech company’s large network of publishers, apps and OEMs.

It has not been determined whether Taboola will integrate DeepDive with Predictive Audiences to help support ad targeting based on searches in the GAI engine.

Predictive Audiences use an advertiser’s first-party conversion data to build AI-driven segments that help target high-intent users across Taboola's network. It’s meant to boost acquisition efficiency and campaign performance.

The Motley Fool, QuinStreet, and NerdWallet are some of the first companies to use the tool, which strengthens Taboola’s Realize suite of targeting tools. Some companies testing the tool during past year while in beta have seen conversion rates rise 270% — all with minimal change to their cost per acquisitions (CPAs).

The AI performance engine is powered by data from Taboola’s code-on-page integrations with publishers, taking signals from the open web.