Five major publishers are participating in the
rollout of an updated white-label search bar and ad format built for how people now search and discover information using questions rather than keywords.
The Arena Group, BuzzFeed, DMGT,
Frommer’s, and Sports Illustrated have partnered with Gist, the white-label AI platform from ProRata. The new features include “Gist Answers,” a new question and answer format, and
“Question Bar,” a new advertising format.
Peter Sloterdyk, Gist CMO, called the ad model part of the new "Q&A economy."
Publishers gain deeper engagement and new
ad inventory based on sponsored questions from their website. They keep the data from site traffic and searches, rather than losing readers to OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Gemini, preventing consumers
from leaving to look for answers somewhere else.
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"Advertisers can learn what questions are the most clicked on and engaged with, and then use the information to filter additional campaigns and
create additional content to determine when consumers will engage with them," Sloterdyk said.
Advertisers also gain a place to answer those questions about their services and products in
a sponsored ad format.
The Question Bar sits inside a publisher’s webpage and surfaces questions readers query. Tapping a question delivers an answer from the publisher’s content,
keeping readers on site instead of looking elsewhere on a different search engine.
Other answer and conversational white-label platform have also developed their own answer engine for
publishers. HuffPost UK, Reach, and USA Today are among the latest to add a new AI answer engine toolbar from Taboola called DeeperDive, which provides content recommendations based on the information
on the publisher's site.
Sloterdyk insists Gist's user experience is different, but did not go deep into the details. He did provide an example of how website
visitors would use the Question Bar.
"Let's say someone asks a question about sunscreen, and Neutrogena wants to show up for that answer," he said. "But there's no longer a keyword to bid
against. Now they must pre-determine the questions, so marketers can determine the questions and prepare to answer them."
As large language models (LLMs) answer questions off
publisher websites, they lose the referral traffic that has long supported their journalism. Brands lose the search visibility and predictable discovery they have relied on for more than two
decades.
Gist, an AI platform owned by ProRata, was founded by Bill Gross, credited for developing the paid-search and pay per click
(PPC) model that built the original ad economy. Since launching in 2024, ProRata has raised more than $75 million, including a recent $40 million Series B funding round.
Eight Oh Two
Marketing, an organic and paid search marketing agency released a 2026 AI + Search Behavior
Study suggesting 37% of consumers now start with an AI engine rather than traditional Google search, and nearly half say AI influences the brands they trust first.
The Question Bar is
live now on The Arena Group sites including Autoblog, whereas Sports Illustrated has deployed Gist Answers across their site, and Frommer’s and BuzzFeed will roll out Gist’s products in
the coming weeks.
DGMT deployed the engine on Metro first followed by other titles. The format is immediately available to advertisers. Gist is on track to serve 500 million questions by the
end of June and more than 1 billion per month by the end of Q3.