Gannett, the company behind USA Today and 220 other publications, is meeting the chatbots throwing its future into question on their own turf. For months, publications across the industry have faced an existential dilemma: what to do about the AI summaries on sites like Google and ChatGPT that regurgitate reporting without sending outlets the traffic they need to survive. The situation is dire across the board; in July, The Guardian reported on a study claiming that since they were introduced, AI summaries resulted in 80% fewer clickthroughs for sites that would have previously ranked first in a search query. “We are watching the same movie as everyone else is watching,” Gannett CEO Mike Reed said today at Wired‘s AI Power Summit. “We can see some risk in the future to any content distribution model that is based primarily on SEO optimization.”
The company has a new gambit to avoid this shaky state of affairs. Today, it will begin rolling out its own “chatbot-like tool” called DeeperDive, which, per Wired, “can converse with readers, summarize insights from its journalism, and suggest new content from across its sites.” It’s essentially a chatbot like any other, except it will be hosted on Gannett’s own sites instead of an external search engine. The tool will reportedly replace the publications’ standard search box (although it’s still there as of this writing) and automatically suggest questions readers may want to ask. (The example Wired gives is “How does Trump’s Fed policy affect the economy?”) GenAI has historically spent a lot of time spouting out incorrect and inaccurate information, but Reed says DeeperDive will attempt to combat that, partly by avoiding opinion pieces. “We only look at our real journalism,” he said.
DeeperDive was developed by advertising company Taboola. Its CEO, Adam Singolda, also promises that the tool “grounds every answer in articles retrieved from our publisher partners and requires sentence-level citations to those sources.” He claims the bot won’t generate an output if it receives conflicting information from two different sources. “Visitors now have a trusted AI answer engine on our platform for anything they want to engage with, anything they want to ask,” Reed said. Now, for this whole thing to work, readers have to actually navigate to the site and use it instead of the Google and ChatGPT bots they’re already growing accustomed to.
