In a bold move to stay relevant in an era where Google’s AI Overviews are siphoning traffic away from traditional outlets, USA Today’s parent company Gannett has unveiled DeeperDive, a chatbot built to guide readers through its sprawling network of stories.
Instead of a plain old search bar, readers can now toss questions at the bot and get snappy summaries grounded in the newsroom’s own reporting. The hope? Keep readers engaged longer, and maybe even spark some loyalty in a fickle news economy.
The twist here is who’s building the tech. DeeperDive isn’t powered by a Silicon Valley giant but by Taboola, the ad company best known for those “Around the Web” boxes.
Its CEO says they fine-tuned open-source models, and every AI-generated answer gets tethered to verified articles, complete with citations. That’s a safeguard against hallucinations—though let’s be honest, readers will be quick to pounce if the bot makes mistakes (Press Gazette).
Gannett isn’t moving in isolation. Across the industry, publishers are scrambling. Some, like the New York Times, are fighting AI in court, while others are cutting deals to license content.
Google’s shift toward AI-first search is already reshaping traffic patterns, and the financial strain is real. Even the BBC has flagged that publishers worldwide are feeling the burn as traffic plunges, and advertising models wobble (BBC).
But here’s where things get messy. Will readers actually want to chat with their news? A slick AI assistant might sound futuristic, but it risks stripping away the serendipity of stumbling on a headline you didn’t know you needed.
There’s also the looming question of whether newsrooms are trading independence for survival by leaning on companies like Taboola. After all, monetization is baked into the pitch—DeeperDive could evolve into a recommendation engine not just for stories but for shopping links.
From my perspective, this feels like both a defensive play and an experiment in reader trust. Gannett’s CEO admitted the move is partly about revenue and partly about survival in a search-driven world.
Yet there’s a human side here too: journalists worrying whether their bylines will be reduced to training fodder, readers unsure if the bot is giving the “whole truth,” and an industry caught between fighting and joining the AI wave.
The bigger story is that DeeperDive isn’t just another chatbot—it’s a test case for whether media companies can wrest back control from the tech titans shaping how we consume information. Whether it’s a lifeline or just another flashy widget will be clear soon enough.