USA Today owner launches AI chatbot to combat traffic losses across 220+ publications

USA Today’s parent company Gannett has launched DeeperDive, an AI-powered chatbot that converses with readers and summarizes content from across its 220+ publications. The tool represents a strategic pivot for publishers struggling with AI companies that trained on their content and now compete for the same audience traffic that search engines once delivered.

The big picture: Traditional publishers face mounting pressure as AI chatbots like Google’s AI Overview feature dramatically reduce website traffic by answering user queries directly instead of directing them to original sources.

• “We are watching the same movie as everyone else is watching,” said Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett and the USA Today Network. “We can see some risk in the future to any content distribution model that is based primarily on SEO optimization.”

How it works: DeeperDive replaces conventional search boxes and automatically suggests relevant questions for readers to explore.

• The tool generates short answers to queries along with relevant stories from across the USA Today network, such as “How does Trump’s Fed policy affect the economy?”
• Reed emphasizes that DeeperDive only draws from factual journalism, not opinion pieces: “We only look at our real journalism.”
• The system was developed by advertising company Taboola using fine-tuned open source models and data from over 600 million daily readers across 11,000 publishers.

Key safeguards: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda says DeeperDive “grounds every answer in articles retrieved from our publisher partners and requires sentence-level citations to those sources.”

• The tool will avoid generating output if information from two sources appears to conflict, prioritizing accuracy over speed.

What they’re saying: Reed sees the tool as both a reader engagement strategy and a data collection opportunity.

• “Visitors now have a trusted AI answer engine on our platform for anything they want to engage with, anything they want to ask, and it is performing really great.”
• “That can help us from a revenue standpoint,” Reed added, referring to insights about reader interests.

What’s next: Gannett and Taboola plan to explore “agentic tools” for readers’ shopping decisions, leveraging what Reed describes as audiences with “higher intent to purchase to begin with.”