Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Yahoo is joining the next era of search with Yahoo Scout, a new AI answer engine that has a standalone site and app, and will be available across its properties.
Why it matters: As search moves from a list of links to conversations and answers, Yahoo is betting its three decades of data can help it compete with newer rivals.
- "Yahoo Scout really can help supercharge the original Yahoo mission of being the trusted guide to the internet," CEO Jim Lanzone tells Axios. "It's an opportunity that I don't think we thought would come around again ... but AI has given us that opportunity, and we're running with it."
Driving the news: On Tuesday, Yahoo Scout debuted in beta on desktop and mobile — within the existing Yahoo Search app on iOS and Android — in the U.S.
- The Scout experience looks more vibrant than other AI answer engines, featuring colorful emoji in the sidebar, easy-to-scan answers with tables and images and inline citations that make results transparent, Axios viewed in a product demo.
- Yahoo is also introducing the Scout Intelligence Platform, bringing generative AI capabilities to Yahoo Mail, News, Finance and Sports with features like email summaries, game breakdowns and stock analysis.
- Scout's primary foundational AI model is Anthropic's Claude. Scout runs on Yahoo's proprietary data, content and insights alongside Claude and Microsoft Bing's grounding API, which surfaces sources from the open web for answers.
The big picture: Yahoo aims to make AI search friendly to users and publishers, delivering answers instantly while still driving traffic back to the open web.
- Every response includes inline citations and links to sources, a deliberate move to "reestablish the social contract" and have search engines send traffic to publishers, Lanzone says. Yahoo also is joining Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace pilot, which has a similar goal of providing sustainable revenue for publishers.
- Yahoo's advantage is in its unique "treasure trove of data" and "deep understanding of query intent," says Eric Feng, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo Research Group.
- Yahoo has 250 million monthly users in the U.S., 500 million user profiles and 18 trillion annual signals (i.e., searching for a stock or a game score or clicking on a news article) across its ecosystem.
Follow the money: Yahoo is testing ads at launch with a small percentage of queries.
- That strategy differs from competitor OpenAI, which has relied on paid subscriptions for ChatGPT and only just recently announced testing ads.
- "Our goal is to make it free for everyone," Feng says. "We want it to be always free and that really fits into our mission of making this very accessible."
Reality check: Google and OpenAI already dominate the AI search market. Even with Yahoo's decades of data and existing user base, winning attention won't be easy.
What's next: Yahoo plans to add more personalization features, new capabilities for different verticals and more opportunities for advertisers.