• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Yahoo, owned by investment firm Apollo Global Management, could see an initial public offering (IPO) or sale to another company soon. It’s not clear whether going public or selling the business will prevail, but one thing is for certain -- the company is preparing to go out on its own once again.

Apollo Global Management holds a 90% stake, with Verizon retaining the remaining 10%. Apollo Funds completed the acquisition of Yahoo -- formerly Verizon Media-- in September 2021, for approximately $5 billion.

“We think we have the tiger by the tail with this asset, and will continue to increase the value of it daily,” Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone told The Information in a TI/TV video interview recently.

"This asset" means all the data and direct relationships with users from Search, Mail, Finance, Maps, Sports, Weather, and News, and many more apps.

Yahoo has not officially filed for an IPO as of February 2026, but market analysts and internal estimates suggest it could be valued at $20 billion or more.

In December 2025, Lazone stated to the media outlet Puck, Yahoo is "ready financially," citing a strong balance sheet and high profitability. 

Lanzone took Yahoo on a turnaround mission in 2021. He said there are hundreds of millions of users, with an app model that completely works and converts at levels rarely seen across this industry. The amount of data Yahoo owns from all its businesses is immense.

Lanzone said all this gives the company one of the “best treasure troves” of data. Most of it is gained from users coming directly to Yahoo’s services, from mail to finance. It creates a well-targeted advertising model to reach 250 million monthly users in the U.S., and 750 million globally.

“We have the first-party relationships with all these users,” he said, adding that 70% of the people who come to Yahoo’s services are logged in.

The turnaround began with changing the foundation of the company, reorganizing it to bring in new employees to run the businesses.

The underlying revenue model that ran the company was very different back then, he said, and in 2023 it was replaced with new ad technology. For example, Yahoo shuttered its native ad platform Gemini.

Consumer-facing products were rebuilt in 2024. “Every pixel in Yahoo was rebuilt between 2024 and 2025,” Lanzone said, adding that it all led to AI. “Yahoo had great bones, and even after all this time it had a huge amount of traffic, which is different to get.”

When Yahoo entered the artificial intelligence era in 2025, the company introduced its AI-based engine, Scout, in 2026. Scout relies on all the data Yahoo owns. Lanzone said 75% of Yahoo users come directly to its services like Mail and Finance.

The company had outsourced its search engine to Bing since 2009, but things changed in the AI era. Lanzone thought the best people to rebuild Yahoo search were those who worked at Yahoo.

When AI is layered over all this data, “extremely high-quality answers” are returned, he said. Answers link the content back to publishers to keep it ad-free, despite its partnership with Anthropic, which the world learned during the Super Bowl is against ads in AI-based chatbots.

“If you are subscription only, your business model is more like Netflix than the search model that got Google to the top and is such a high percentage of global advertising,” Lanzone said. “Search advertising as a concept was litigated in the late ‘90s. That question has been asked and answered.”  

There is a way to bring search advertising into AI through paid links. 

Yahoo Search used paid and sponsored links as a core part of its business model for more than two decades. There’s a blue link, the searcher clicks on it, and the hyperlink takes the user to the publisher that published the content.

Yahoo at one time had an opportunity to acquire Netflix for $4 billion in 2013, but acquired Tumblr instead. Marissa Mayer, who was CEO at the time, regretted not acquiring the company.