The news: Yahoo is stepping into AI-powered search with Scout, a new answer engine launching in beta across desktop and mobile inside the Yahoo Search app. 

Unlike OpenAI, which built ChatGPT around subscriptions and is only now testing ads, Yahoo is positioning Scout as a free, ad-supported product. The plan is to scale over paywalls, using advertising to fund access and make AI discovery broadly available.

Yahoo—which reaches 250 million monthly users in the US, spans 500 million user profiles, and captures 18 trillion intent signals each year, per Axios—is positioning Scout as an aggregation layer to modernize how information is surfaced across its platform. 

“Yahoo Scout can help supercharge the original Yahoo mission of being the trusted guide to the internet,” CEO Jim Lanzone told Axios. “It’s an opportunity I don’t think we thought would come around again ... but AI has given us that opportunity, and we’re running with it.”

Trendspotting: Legacy brands are using AI as the opening to reframe their relevance. 

• Digg is deploying AI to automate content moderation and spam detection. 
• Tumblr and Wordpress.com owner Automattic struck a deal with Midjourney and OpenAI in 2024 to train AI models on content from the sites. 
• Ask.com, which started as Ask Jeeves, moved away from search last year and is now an AI-driven answer engine that generates magazine-style articles.

Implications for brands: By leaning on Yahoo’s trove of search, news, finance, and sports data, Scout offers a different ad surface than ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews with deeper context into those verticals.

With so many intent signals flowing through Yahoo’s properties, Scout ads can be sold on situational relevance, not just text matching. 

Brands should treat Scout as an early test bed for advertising inside AI-generated answers—prioritizing structured, authoritative content and context-aware creative.