Publishing giant Gannett has deployed an AI-powered conversational tool across its 221 publications, including USA Today, as traditional search engine traffic faces pressure from Google’s AI Overview feature.
DeeperDive replaces conventional search functionality with a chatbot interface that summarises journalism insights and suggests relevant content from Gannett’s network of publications, reports WIRED.
Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett and the USA Today Network, announced the launch at WIRED’s AI Power Summit, stating that Google’s AI Overview has significantly reduced publisher traffic across the industry.
“We can see some risk in the future to any content distribution model that is based primarily on SEO optimisation,” Reed explained, highlighting the challenge facing publishers as AI systems increasingly summarise their content rather than directing users to original sources.
The tool was developed through a partnership with advertising technology company Taboola, which fine-tuned multiple open-source language models for the implementation.
Adam Singolda, Taboola’s CEO, indicates DeeperDive leverages data from over 600 million daily readers across approximately 11,000 publishers within Taboola’s network. The system requires sentence-level citations to source materials and avoids generating responses when conflicting information appears across sources.
DeeperDive automatically suggests questions readers might explore, such as economic policy queries, whilst generating responses based exclusively on factual journalism rather than opinion content.
Reed emphasises that the tool aims to reveal reader interests and preferences, potentially supporting revenue generation through enhanced audience insights.
Gannett has pursued multiple AI strategies, including content licensing agreements with Amazon and Perplexity, whilst actively blocking web scrapers that attempt unauthorised content extraction.
The company plans to explore AI-powered shopping recommendation tools, leveraging what Reed describes as audiences with “higher intent to purchase” compared to general web traffic.
The deployment represents publishers’ attempts to harness generative AI technology for reader engagement rather than simply defending against AI systems that threaten traditional traffic sources.
DeeperDive’s implementation across Gannett’s substantial publication portfolio provides a significant test case for AI-driven publisher strategies in an evolving digital media landscape.
