Taboola today announced a partnership with Motorola that will put its DeeperDive generative AI answer engine on the lockscreen of select moto g smartphones, making Motorola the first smartphone manufacturer to integrate the product, according to Taboola. The rollout is expected to come in phases across 2026 and 2027, in markets that include the UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Mexico and Argentina.

In Short

Taboola, a company that recommends articles and sells ads on news websites, has agreed with Motorola to put its AI question-and-answer tool on the lockscreen of some moto g phones. That matters to publishers and advertisers because the tool has until now lived on news websites, and on these phones it will sit in front of people before they open a browser or an app. The rollout runs through 2026 and 2027 in countries such as the UK, Germany, Spain and Mexico, but the announcement does not say which publishers supply the answers or whether ads come with them.

What changes on the phone

The mechanics, as Taboola describes them, are brief. "On select moto g devices, consumers will be able to access DeeperDive directly from their lockscreen to explore topics ranging from sports and entertainment to finance, travel, politics, and more," according to the release. Users ask a question, receive an answer "informed by trusted publisher content," and can then move on to related stories and follow-up topics.

Taboola calls the arrangement "an industry-first partnership." The opening of the release says DeeperDive will reach select moto g smartphones "in the coming months." A later paragraph is more specific about the shape of the schedule, if not the dates: the experience "is expected to roll out in phases across select moto g devices throughout 2026 and 2027, including markets such as the UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Mexico, and Argentina."

Several details are absent. The release does not name the moto g models involved or say how many devices will receive the feature. It does not say whether DeeperDive will be switched on by default or will need to be enabled. The United States does not appear among the named markets, although the phrase "including markets such as" leaves open whether the list is complete. With nine weeks of 2026 left, there is also no indication of how many devices or countries will have the feature before the year ends.

The two companies are not new to each other. According to Taboola, the integration "builds on Motorola and Taboola's long standing relationship, which already brings personalized content recommendations to select moto g devices and markets." The release does not say when that relationship began or name the product behind those recommendations. Taboola's device business has included Samsung and Xiaomi as manufacturers, as PPC Land noted in its coverage of Taboola's NBC News display agreement in August, and in the first quarter of 2026 management credited Taboola News, alongside Realize and Bidded Supply, for growth in ex-TAC gross profit.

How DeeperDive has worked until now

DeeperDive was built for publisher websites. Taboola launched the product on June 11, 2025 with Gannett's USA TODAY Network and The Independent as launch partners. In that original form, the tool answered natural-language questions using only the host publisher's archive, with each answer linking to related articles on the same site. Each publisher's content sat in a separate silo. Integration ran through JavaScript on the publisher's pages, API connections to its content databases and Taboola's cloud infrastructure, and the business model rested on contextual ads placed inside the AI-generated answers.

Adoption followed in stages. The Bangkok Post selected DeeperDive on November 18, 2025, the first media organisation in Southeast Asia to do so. Reach, the UK publisher behind Express and Daily Star, chose the tool in February 2026, and HuffPost UK followed in April.

Today's release gives no new usage figures. On April 8, 2026, Taboola said DeeperDive had reached nearly 7 million monthly active users and was expanding into French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. At that point the company counted more than 10 million reader questions a month across the network, about half of them about news, entertainment and sports from the previous 24 hours. It also reported engagement rates of up to 17% on participating sites.

Today's release describes the product in general terms: DeeperDive "uses generative AI and high-quality publisher content to provide relevant answers, related stories, and additional context around a user's questions." It names USA TODAY Co. - the name Gannett adopted in November 2025 - along with HuffPost UK, BuzzFeed Asia and Bangkok Post among the publishers that have integrated the tool "since 2025."

One archive or many?

The move to a phone raises a structural question the release does not answer. On a publisher's website, there is one host and one archive. A lockscreen has no host publisher. Taboola's wording shifts accordingly, to "trusted publishers" and "publisher content" in the plural, but the release does not say which publishers will supply material for the Motorola version, whether they are the same outlets already running DeeperDive on their own sites, or whether a single answer can draw on several of them.

And where does a user land after tapping a related story - on a publisher's website, in a browser, or on another Taboola surface? The release does not say. That is not a small matter for publishers. The original pitch for DeeperDive was that it kept readers on the publisher's own pages, rather than sending them to an outside AI service.

Languages

The named markets imply at least five languages: English in the UK, German in Germany, French in France, Spanish in Spain, Mexico and Argentina, and Italian in Italy. Four of them are covered by DeeperDive's existing publishers or by April's expansion. Italian was not among the six languages Taboola added in April, and the release does not say whether DeeperDive now operates in Italian.

What the release leaves out

Advertising is not mentioned once. On publisher websites, DeeperDive is ad-supported, with contextual ads inside answers and no charge to publishers or readers, according to Taboola's April announcement. Whether the lockscreen version will carry ads, who would sell them, and how any revenue would be split between Taboola, Motorola and the publishers whose content informs the answers are all left unstated. Financial terms of the partnership are not disclosed either.

The release is also silent on data. Questions typed on a lockscreen are a new kind of signal for Taboola, and the release does not describe how they will be stored or processed, or whether Taboola will use them for anything beyond answering the query. Five of the seven named markets - the UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy - fall under European data protection law.

Motorola does not speak in the release. The only quote comes from Taboola's chief executive.

The chief executive's case

"Motorola continues to innovate in how consumers interact with their devices and discover the content that matters to them," said Adam Singolda, CEO of Taboola. "DeeperDive creates a new way for people to explore their interests and get useful answers informed by trusted publisher content. We're proud to expand our relationship with Motorola and bring this experience directly to consumers on their smartphones."

The closing paragraph of the release restates the purpose in Taboola's terms: the product "helps consumers move from a question to a deeper understanding of a topic, whether they're exploring a travel destination, catching up on sports, or learning more about the latest news."

Why a phone maker matters to Taboola

Distribution is the plain reason. DeeperDive's audience has so far depended on readers already visiting a partner publisher's site. In its April announcement, Taboola compared DeeperDive's nearly 7 million monthly users with about 810 million for ChatGPT, about 750 million for Gemini and 30 million for Perplexity, and Singolda acknowledged that DeeperDive was not yet at Perplexity's scale. A lockscreen integration puts the product in front of phone owners who may never open a DeeperDive publisher's website.

Motorola hardware is not new ground for AI answer engines, however. On April 24, 2025, Perplexity said its app would come pre-installed on all new Motorola devices, reachable through Moto AI, according to Perplexity. Taboola's claim of a first refers to DeeperDive specifically: according to the company, no other phone maker has integrated it.

The timing also follows a difficult stretch for Taboola's core business in native advertising and recommendations. In August, Taboola reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $476.8 million, up 2.4% year over year but $15.2 million below the low end of its guidance. Ex-TAC gross profit rose 11.8% to $192.4 million. Google's decision to treat back button hijacking as spam - announced on April 13, 2026, with enforcement from June 15 - eliminated Taboola's Explore More product, which the company had expected to contribute more than $20 million of ex-TAC gross profit in the second half of the year. The company guided to third-quarter revenue of $460 million to $473 million.

Singolda has described the wider aim as making Taboola the economic backbone of the open web for everything outside search and social, a phrase he used around the NBC News agreement in August. A placement on phone lockscreens sits outside both search and social, and outside any single publisher's website.

Publishers and the mobile discovery layer

For publishers, the deal lands on a surface where referral patterns have already moved. NewzDash data from December 2025 showed traditional Google Web Search falling from 51.10% of Google traffic to news publishers in 2023 to 27.42% in the fourth quarter of 2025, while Google Discover rose from 37.03% to 67.51%. Discover is a feed that serves articles without a query. DeeperDive on a moto g lockscreen works the other way round: a question comes first, and the stories follow.

Whether an answer on a lockscreen leads to a visit or replaces one is the open question, and it is the same one AI summaries in search have raised. Ahrefs data published in February 2026 associated AI Overviews with a 58% drop in click-through rate for position-one results. Taboola's own April figures suggested about 20% of DeeperDive users who interact go on to read another article. Those numbers describe the on-site product. How they translate to a phone's lockscreen, where no article is open to begin with, remains to be measured, and the release offers no projection.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Taboola (NASDAQ: TBLA), the content recommendation and advertising company, and smartphone maker Motorola. The release quotes Taboola CEO Adam Singolda and names USA TODAY Co., HuffPost UK, BuzzFeed Asia and Bangkok Post as existing DeeperDive publishers.

What: Motorola will integrate Taboola's DeeperDive generative AI answer engine into the lockscreen of select moto g smartphones, letting users ask questions and receive answers informed by publisher content, with related stories and follow-up topics. Taboola says Motorola is the first smartphone manufacturer to integrate DeeperDive. Device models, financial terms, participating publishers and any advertising are not disclosed.

When: Announced today, October 28, 2026. The phased rollout is expected throughout 2026 and 2027.

Where: Select moto g devices in markets including the UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Mexico and Argentina.

Why: The deal takes DeeperDive, which reported nearly 7 million monthly active users in April, beyond publisher websites and onto a device surface that comes before any app or browser. It follows a second quarter in which Taboola missed its revenue guidance and lost more than $20 million in expected second-half ex-TAC gross profit to a Google policy change, and it leaves publishers without answers on whose content feeds the lockscreen and where readers are sent.