USA Today Enters Its Gen AI Era With a Chatbot
Summary
Gannett, the publisher behind USA Today and hundreds of local titles, has launched DeeperDive — a chatbot-style tool developed with Taboola that answers reader queries, summarises reporting, and recommends related stories across the USA Today network. The aim is twofold: reclaim reader attention that AI features from search engines have siphoned off, and create a trustable, citation-backed AI experience that drives engagement and revenue.
DeeperDive replaces the traditional search box, suggests questions, and produces concise answers grounded in sentence-level citations from verified journalism. Gannett says it avoids opinion pieces and uses licensed content, while Taboola says the system is fine-tuned on open-source models and benefits from its large publisher network for grounding answers.
Key Points
- DeeperDive is a conversational AI tool on USA Today designed to summarise reporting and recommend related articles.
- Gannett positions the tool as a defensive and proactive response to traffic losses from AI features like Google’s AI Overview.
- Taboola built DeeperDive by fine-tuning open-source models and emphasises sentence-level citations to source articles.
- The tool avoids opinion pieces, aims to ground answers in verified journalism, and will surface related stories from the USA Today network.
- Gannett sees potential commercial upside — better reader insights and shopping/agent use cases that could boost revenue.
Context and relevance
This launch sits at the intersection of two big trends: publishers seeking to protect and monetise original reporting in an era when summarising AIs reduce referral traffic, and the broader media industry’s experiments with generative AI as a product and revenue channel. DeeperDive exemplifies how news organisations are trying to turn the same tech that threatens traffic into a tool for engagement and commerce, while stressing editorial grounding to preserve trust.
Why should I read this?
Because it shows how a major publisher is tackling the AI problem head-on — not by hiding from it, but by building its own chatbot to keep readers on site and monetise interactions. If you work in media, advertising or product, this is a neat real-world example of strategy, partnerships and the trade-offs between openness and control. We read it so you don’t have to — unless you want the full WIRED piece, of course.
Author’s note
Punchy: Gannett isn’t dabbling — it’s betting. DeeperDive is as much about protecting traffic and trust as it is about new revenue paths. Worth watching if you care about the future of news discovery and who owns the reader relationship.
Source
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/usa-today-enters-its-gen-ai-era-with-a-chatbot/