Taboola on April 23, 2026, announced the launch of Realize+, a new agentic advertising system built on top of its existing Realize platform. The product is designed to automate campaign decisions in real time, reducing manual effort while targeting performance outcomes outside the walled gardens of search and social. Alongside the launch, Taboola opened Realize to Claude Skills, allowing advertisers and agencies to operate campaigns from within Anthropic's Claude environment - a notable step as ad tech platforms race to embed themselves into AI-native workflows.

What is Realize+

Realize+ is not a standalone product but an extension of the broader Realize platform, which Taboola has been developing as its primary advertiser-facing offering since the company moved beyond native content recommendations. According to Taboola, Realize is a technology platform that helps advertisers achieve outcomes at scale, leveraging the company's unique supply, first-party data, and AI. It enables performance campaigns across many of the world's largest and most trusted publishers, OEMs, and apps - reaching approximately 600 million daily active users across premium properties including NBC News, Yahoo, Business Insider, CBS News, ABC News, and USA Today.

The new Realize+ layer adds an agentic dimension to the system. According to the company's press release, Realize+ continuously makes and executes campaign decisions, helping drive incremental results while reducing manual effort. This positions it structurally differently from traditional campaign management tools, which require human intervention to adjust bidding, creative, or targeting parameters.

The architecture rests on two functional components. The first is the Decision Engine, which automatically moves budget in real time toward the highest-performing campaigns and opportunities using a new tool called the Budget Allocator. The second is the Element Generator, which creates and continuously improves ads and targeting, keeping campaigns effective without manual updates. Together, according to Taboola, these two systems are designed to replicate the performance and autonomy associated with walled garden platforms - Google Performance Max, Meta Advantage+ - while providing a direct path to premium open web inventory.

The case against walled gardens

The framing of Realize+ is explicitly competitive with search and social platforms. Taboola's announcement draws on a survey of 200 senior marketers at U.S. and UK enterprises with 1,000 or more employees, conducted in 2026. According to that survey, 75% of marketing leaders say finding a performance channel that delivers incremental outcomes beyond search and social is extremely or very important. A further 80% say they would increase investment in the open web if it offered the same AI-powered automation they rely on from the walled gardens. Nearly 86% say they would allocate up to a quarter of their performance budgets to the open web if such capabilities were available.

These numbers put pressure on a structural question the industry has grappled with for years: why does the open web attract a fraction of digital ad spend relative to its share of user time? As PPC Land has tracked, Taboola expanded the Realize platform in October 2025 with deepened partnerships with TIME, Weather Channel Digital, Gannett, Nexstar, and Slate, adding display inventory to what had historically been a native-focused network. The company also expected to pay over $1.5 billion to publishers and OEMs in 2025. Realize+ represents the next phase of that strategy - moving from inventory expansion to automation depth.

The argument Taboola makes is that performance marketers have historically stayed within search and social not simply because of superior reach, but because of the automation layer. Google and Meta have spent over a decade building systems - Performance Max, Advantage+, Smart Bidding - that remove friction from campaign management at scale. Realize+ is Taboola's attempt to match that abstraction level on the open web, without the opacity that critics of walled garden systems have repeatedly flagged.

Transparency as a feature

One of the more specific claims embedded in the Realize+ announcement concerns transparency. According to the press release, "advertisers can easily see where their ads are running and adjust their strategy to suit their specific needs. Realize+ optimizes based on outcomes with no O&O bias." The O&O reference - owned and operated - is a direct critique of how Meta and Google systems weight their own inventory when making placement decisions within automated campaigns.

Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola, addressed this in his quoted statement: "For years, advertisers have hit a ceiling when trying to scale performance beyond search and social. With Realize+, we're removing that barrier - bringing automation, intelligence, and true performance to the open web so marketers can drive measurable growth at scale."

Singolda went further on the technical side, describing the complexity advertisers face: "hundreds of variables across creative, audience, bidding, and placement - it's simply not tractable for humans to manage. Agentic AI changes that. It allows us to explore and optimize across that entire space dynamically, not just reactively. What's powerful about Realize+ is that we're doing this while maintaining transparency and control, which is something that's been largely missing in walled garden systems."

That claim is harder to evaluate at launch. Transparency in automated systems is a long-standing challenge. PPC Land has covered industry disputes over auction transparency standards, and the tension between automation and advertiser visibility has shaped regulatory debate in both the United States and Europe. Whether Realize+ delivers meaningfully greater visibility than, say, Performance Max will depend on implementation details that have not yet been made public.

Beta timeline and roadmap

Realize+ has not appeared without prior testing. According to Taboola, the system spent several months in beta before the April 23 announcement. Phase 2 of the beta will expand in Q2 2026 with improved models. The company also described an "extensive roadmap throughout 2026," though specifics were not disclosed in the press materials.

Early advertiser commentary was cautiously positive. Héctor Vargas Mendoza, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Sonova Marketing GmbH, said in the press release: "Allocating budget across campaigns in real time is one of the biggest challenges in performance marketing. Tools like Realize+ and its Budget Allocator are especially compelling because they have the potential to automatically shift spend toward what's working best - without constant manual adjustments." He added that this "kind of efficiency could be a meaningful unlock for teams looking to drive stronger performance at scale."

Matt Linder, Co-founder at Strand Marketing, described the early results: "We've been encouraged by the early results we're seeing with Realize, particularly its ability to help optimize campaigns in real time and surface new opportunities for growth. As these capabilities continue to evolve with Realize+, we're excited about the potential to further streamline execution and drive even stronger performance moving forward."

The existing Realize platform has shown concrete numbers at the campaign level. According to Taboola's published figures, eCommerce advertisers on the platform have seen a 69% reduction in cost per engagement, agencies have reported a 50% increase in click-through rate, and enterprise brands have achieved a 130% increase in conversion rate. Other reported metrics include a 30% reduction in cost per session, 100,000 leads per month for certain accounts, and a 679% average return on ad spend. These numbers come from individual case studies and represent performance at the top end of outcomes rather than averages across the platform.

The Claude Skills integration

The second major announcement embedded within the Realize+ launch concerns Anthropic's Claude. According to the press release, Realize is opening itself to Claude Skills, giving advertisers and agencies a conversational front door to Taboola from inside the Claude environment. The first skill to be released will handle campaign setup and optimization. Taboola describes this as the first of several skills it plans to release over the coming months, targeting agencies and advertisers that are standardizing on AI-native workflows.

This is not the first ad tech platform to connect its infrastructure to Claude. The Trade Desk in March 2026 confirmed it is running a closed beta allowing advertisers to build programmatic campaigns through Anthropic's Claude on its Kokai platform. Amazon Ads launched an MCP Server in November 2025 enabling AI agents to access its advertising platform through a standardized protocol - a development PPC Land covered as it moved from closed to open beta in February 2026. Anthropic's own integrations framework, announced in May 2025, established the Model Context Protocol as a foundation for exactly these kinds of third-party connections.

What makes Taboola's implementation notable is the framing around the open web. Singolda described the goal as making "Taboola the easiest open web platform to plug into any agent, any stack, any workflow." The Claude Skills integration represents a specific bet: that agencies will increasingly operate through AI assistant interfaces rather than dedicated dashboards, and that being accessible from within Claude - rather than requiring a separate login - reduces enough friction to shift budget allocation decisions.

The architecture shown in Taboola's diagram positions Claude as an entry point that can connect to either Realize+ (the agentic, more automated layer) or Realize (the manual campaign management layer), with autonomous execution flowing across bidding strategies, creatives, and audiences toward premium inventory environments. This agent-to-agent framing - where Claude interacts with Realize+ to run campaigns on behalf of an advertiser - matches a broader shift in how enterprise software vendors are positioning their products for AI-native buyers.

Channel99 in February 2026 similarly launched an MCP server connecting B2B marketing performance data to Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. The pattern suggests that Claude, in particular, is becoming a target integration layer for ad tech vendors seeking to reach performance marketing teams that have adopted AI assistant workflows.

Competitive context

The open web performance advertising space has attracted increasing investment from players seeking to challenge the dominance of Google and Meta. Infillion and Yobi in January 2026 announced a partnership explicitly framed as bringing Performance Max-style optimization to independent advertisers on the open web - using privacy-first behavioral intelligence rather than walled garden data. The pattern is consistent: as Google and Meta's automated systems grow more powerful and more opaque, competing platforms are pitching transparent automation as both a performance and a compliance advantage.

Taboola has been methodically building the infrastructure required to compete at this level. Predictive Audiences, launched in June 2025, brought AI-powered targeting to the platform by combining advertiser first-party conversion data with Taboola's network intelligence, achieving conversion improvements of up to 270% for early adopters including The Motley Fool, QuinStreet, and NerdWallet. Abby, launched in October 2024, introduced a generative AI assistant for campaign creation that reduced launch time by up to 75%. Realize+ represents the convergence of those investments into a single agentic system.

The company's financial scale provides a platform for this expansion. According to Taboola, it works with thousands of businesses that advertise directly on Realize, reaching approximately 600 million daily active users across some of the best publishers in the world. Publishers like NBC News and Yahoo, alongside OEMs such as Samsung and Xiaomi, use Taboola's technology to grow audience and revenue, enabling Realize to offer unique data, specialized algorithms, and unmatched scale.

What it means for media buyers

For performance marketing teams, Realize+ represents a meaningful expansion of the addressable automation landscape. The Budget Allocator introduces a specific capability that has been absent from most open web platforms: real-time, cross-campaign budget reallocation driven by performance signals rather than human review cycles. In walled garden environments, this kind of dynamic allocation is standard - it is how Performance Max and Advantage+ manage spend. On the open web, budget shifts typically require manual adjustment or scheduled rules, both of which lag behind real-time market conditions.

The Element Generator addresses the creative side of the same problem. Performance marketers running automated campaigns on Google and Meta benefit from continuous creative testing and regeneration, with the platforms selecting and serving the best-performing variants without human instruction. If Realize+ delivers comparable functionality on premium publisher inventory, it removes one of the key friction points that has kept open web budgets small relative to search and social.

The transparency commitment, if it holds up in practice, addresses a separate pain point. Publishers and buy-side platforms have spent years arguing about the opacity of walled garden reporting. Agencies that have standardized their measurement infrastructure around MRC-auditable signals have faced persistent gaps when working with automated buying systems that do not expose granular placement or bid data. Taboola's claim that Realize+ shows advertisers exactly where ads run - and allows them to adjust - would, if accurate, represent a genuine differentiation.

The Claude Skills launch suggests a third dimension: workflow integration. Agencies that have adopted AI-native processes are not looking for another dashboard. They want platforms that surface into the tools they already use. The first Realize skill focuses on campaign setup and optimization, which means the entry-level use case is straightforward: an agency team could, in principle, configure and adjust Taboola campaigns without leaving their Claude environment. Subsequent skills, which Taboola says are planned across 2026, could extend this integration deeper into reporting, creative, and audience management.

Whether Realize+ delivers on these claims at scale is a question that will take months of real-world deployment to answer. The beta phase was limited, and the Q2 2026 expansion with improved models will be the first test at meaningful volume. For now, the April 23 announcement establishes the architecture and the ambition - and positions Taboola's open web platform as a direct challenger to the automation depth that has kept search and social at the center of performance budgets.

Timeline

Summary

Who - Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA), a New York-based advertising technology company, announced Realize+ on April 23, 2026. The announcement cited early advertiser participants including Sonova Marketing GmbH and Strand Marketing, and named Anthropic's Claude as the first AI environment to receive a Realize skill. Adam Singolda serves as CEO and founder.

What - Realize+ is an agentic advertising system built on Taboola's Realize platform. It is structured around two technical components: a Decision Engine that includes a Budget Allocator for real-time cross-campaign budget reallocation, and an Element Generator that continuously creates and improves ad creative and targeting. Simultaneously, Taboola opened Realize to Claude Skills, starting with a skill for campaign setup and optimization.

When - The announcement was made on April 23, 2026. The system had been in beta for several months prior. Phase 2 of the beta, featuring improved models, is planned for Q2 2026, with an expanded roadmap across the remainder of the year.

Where - Realize+ operates across Taboola's network of publishers, OEMs, and apps reaching approximately 600 million daily active users. Premium publisher environments include NBC News, Yahoo, Business Insider, CBS News, ABC News, and USA Today. The Claude Skills integration allows advertisers to access Realize from within Anthropic's Claude environment.

Why - According to a Taboola-commissioned survey of 200 senior marketers at U.S. and UK enterprises with 1,000 or more employees conducted in 2026, 80% say they would increase open web investment if it offered AI-powered automation comparable to search and social platforms. The open web has historically captured a disproportionately small share of performance budgets relative to user time spent. Realize+ positions Taboola to compete directly with the automation depth of walled garden systems while claiming greater transparency over placement and budget decisions.

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