• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Taboola entered the next phase of its agentic ad system this week, launching a rebuilt platform and AI-generated advertisement running on YouTube that highlights its features, benefits, and future. 

"Fishing for customers through search and social hit a performance ceiling, and costs rose," the fictitious fox narrator says. That's before Taboola this week launched Realize+ with a completely new architecture based on agentic AI.

Realize+ consistently creates and implements campaign strategies and generates outcomes, while minimizing manual work.

The system is built to help performance marketers find and convert consumers through machine learning -- a task humans may miss or be unable to reach efficiently by reallocating budgets and optimizing content.

Hector Vargas Mendoza, senior growth marketing manager, team lead at Sonova Marketing GmbH, said allocating budgets across campaigns in real-time is one of the biggest challenges in performance marketing.

Realize+ relies on first-party data and AI, with a “Decision Engine” that automatically moves budgets in real-time to the highest-performing campaigns and opportunities using a new tool called the Budget Allocator. The “Element Generator” continuously improves ads and targeting without manual updates.

The platform spent several months in beta, and after receiving positive feedback, Phase 2 launches in Q2 with improved models. An extensive roadmap for 2026 also will be released.

On the roadmap, Realize+ will soon integrate with Anthropic Claude Skills, giving advertisers and agencies a conversational front door to Taboola.

The first skill released will provide campaign setup and optimization. It is the first of several skills Taboola plans to release over the coming months, which remove friction for agencies and advertisers standardizing on AI-native workflows.

Taboola estimates that 80% of marketers would increase investment in the open web if offered automated, AI-powered campaign solutions from the walled gardens, according to company data. Nearly 86% of marketers said they would allocate up to one-quarter of their performance budgets to the open web if such capabilities were available.

The content discovery and recommendations engine works with about 18,000 advertisers like Walmart, Macy’s and Wayfair as of early 2026, and enables performance campaigns across publishers NBC News, Yahoo, The Weather Company, and others. It also works with ad agencies on behalf of brands.

This is the way I imagine future ad systems will work -- autonomously, pulling from data and optimizing content based on human feedback, as the platform goes through the process of targeting ads. 

The capabilities of Realize+ are designed to replicate the performance of walled gardens, while providing a direct path to premium inventory and ensuring that more of the budget is spent on outcomes. 

The latest mergers, expansions, partnerships and acquisitions in the performance marketing sector have enabled Taboola to directly benefit from all the activity.

Its platforms were selected by HuffPost UK to deploy its DeeperDive technology, another one of its platforms. 

DeeperDive, which is supporting about 7 million monthly active users just eight months after its launch, was designed as an “Answer Engine” and integrates with publishers such as Gannett | USA Today Network, India Today, and BuzzFeed Asia. It allows users to explore a range of topics including politics, sports, finance, entertainment, and shopping.

Approximately 50% of the questions posed by users focus on recent news, entertainment, and sports. The platform has achieved a user engagement rate of up to 17%, with one in six visitors actively asking questions, according to data from a company report scheduled soon for publication.

The report is based on a survey of 200 senior marketers at U.S. and U.K. enterprises with more than 1,000 employees in 2026.