Yahoo's branded AI companion -- designed to guide users across
its properties -- launched today as its first version of an AI-powered answer engine. It also formed partnerships with Anthropic and Microsoft.
The engine, Yahoo Scout, takes the company
back to its roots and integrates services across the Yahoo network including Yahoo News, Finance, Mail, and traditional search. It offers suggested searches with filters for topics like news, finance,
sports, shopping, and travel.
“Search is fundamentally changing, and our team has been inspired to use our decades of experience and extremely rare assets to create something
uniquely useful for Yahoo’s hundreds of millions of monthly users,” wrote Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo, in a blog post. “This beta launch is just the
starting point. From search to our industry-leading verticals, Yahoo Scout will help our users accomplish their goals online faster and better than ever before.”
With nearly 250 million monthly users across the U.S., and 700 million globally, Yahoo remains the second-most popular email service globally and
the third-most popular search engine in the U.S., although the service has been powered by either Bing or Google since 2009.
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Integration across multiple services is what experts and analysts say
will help companies see success in AI-driven search as more companies enter the space.
Jim Yu, BrightEdge CEO, told MediaPost that "the AI search gold rush is over, and we are now
entering a brutal period of natural selection where only the most integrated platforms survive."
Yu's data shows that in December, Google Gemini passed Perplexity in referral traffic in
December. He attributes that to Google's massive network of services. He said it was unexpected because Perplexity advertising its service as a search engine, and Gemini does not.
Yahoo
today also announced the launch of the Yahoo Scout Intelligence Platform, which combines advanced AI capabilities with all of Yahoo’s vertical experiences, from mail to sports. It powers
smart features such as AI summaries in Yahoo's services, including News.
For example, Yahoo Shopping, powered by Yahoo Scout, provides research that would typically take shoppers hours to
do on their own, comparing brands and products. It also provides shoppable links to make purchases.
Yahoo also announced a partnership with Anthropic to use Claude as Yahoo
Scout’s primary foundational AI model.
"When you're serving hundreds of millions of users, you need AI that can do more than retrieve information – it has to reason,
synthesize, and explain. Yahoo is building toward a more personalized, trustworthy kind of search, and Claude's ability to deliver that quality of guidance at scale is at the heart of Yahoo Scout,"
wrote Ami Vora, head of product at Anthropic.
Yahoo Scout also builds on Yahoo’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft
Bing’s API.
By combining this API with Yahoo’s data and content ecosystem, Yahoo Scout serves answers informed by what the company calls "authoritative sources" from across
the open web.
Yahoo joined Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace pilot, reflecting a shared commitment to expanding publisher reach, connecting original work with
new audiences, and supporting sustainable revenue opportunities for publishers.