Taboola opened the monetization engine behind its DeeperDive answer engine to outside generative AI companies on June 16, 2026, offering conversational AI providers, chatbot developers, and virtual assistant makers a way to convert user queries directly into advertising revenue. The Nasdaq-listed advertising technology company built the offer on infrastructure it had spent a year developing inside its own publisher network, and it is now extending that infrastructure outward to any AI platform that wants it. Adam Singolda, chief executive at Taboola, framed the move as an attempt to solve a problem that has dogged the entire generative AI industry since chatbots became mainstream: how do these products make money without charging every user a subscription fee?

DeeperDive, first launched in June 2025, is a generative AI system that Taboola describes as an answer engine, embedded across publisher websites so that readers can ask conversational questions and receive responses drawn exclusively from that publisher's own editorial archive. According to Taboola, the tool now generates tens of millions of AI-powered answers every month for more than 7 million users, a figure that aligns with the company's own April 2026 disclosure that DeeperDive had reached nearly 7 million monthly active users, as previously reported by PPC Land. That earlier milestone came six months after general availability and included an expansion into six additional languages: French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

What changed on June 16 is not DeeperDive itself, but who can plug into the commercial machinery sitting underneath it. Rather than keeping that monetization layer exclusive to the publishers who embed DeeperDive on their own websites, Taboola is now offering it to any generative AI company building conversational products - chatbots, virtual assistants, and other answer engines that are not necessarily tied to a news publisher at all. According to Taboola, these platforms can now instantly and seamlessly turn user queries into new revenue opportunities using the same underlying demand infrastructure that already serves DeeperDive.

How the expanded platform works

The mechanism Taboola is exporting rests on three components working together. Large language models generate the conversational responses; retrieval systems pull in relevant supporting content; and Taboola's proprietary intent graphmaps what a user is likely to want next, based on the specific language used in a query. According to Taboola, this combination allows DeeperDive to process tens of millions of AI-powered answers every month while continuously refining answer quality, topical relevance, and monetization potential simultaneously, rather than treating those three goals as separate problems to solve in sequence.

Sitting behind that pipeline is Realize, Taboola's performance advertising platform, which the company describes as the technology driving demand from direct relationships with tens of thousands of advertisers into the ads that appear on DeeperDive. Realize is not new. Taboola expanded the platform in October 2025 with deepened partnerships covering TIME, Weather Channel Digital, Gannett, Nexstar, and Slate, extending its reach into display inventory beyond its traditional native advertising format. What is new is that Realize's advertiser demand can now be summoned by a third-party AI product that has nothing to do with Taboola's existing publisher relationships - provided that product integrates with the newly opened monetization layer.

The commercial logic is plain enough, and Taboola's own example illustrates it directly. According to the company, if a user asks a generative AI platform about buying a home, that platform can seamlessly surface a highly relevant mortgage advertisement, or another advertisement likely to result in a conversion, creating what Taboola calls a natural blend of utility and monetization. The query itself becomes the targeting signal; no separate campaign setup, keyword bidding, or manual ad placement is required from the AI platform integrating the technology.

The infrastructure question: NVIDIA and inference at scale

Underpinning all of this is a hardware dependency that Taboola has been building out for months. According to Taboola, DeeperDive is powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, which the company says enables high-throughput, low-latency inference at the scale required to serve millions of AI interactions while simultaneously optimizing for answer quality, relevance, and monetization. That framing is consistent with NVIDIA's own account of the partnership. NVIDIA published details of six advertising and marketing technology collaborations - including Taboola, alongside Alembic, Amazon Web Services, Criteo, HiggsField, and KERV.ai - on June 18, 2026, as reported by PPC Land ahead of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. According to that reporting, Taboola's application of NVIDIA GPU infrastructure focuses specifically on DeeperDive, and the company is extending that infrastructure to AI platforms and chatbots so they can generate revenue from advertising.

The inference cost question matters because of how Taboola structures its publisher relationships. Publishers integrating DeeperDive do not pay for the service; instead, they receive a share of the advertising revenue generated through it. That economic model only works if the cost of running each query through the system stays low enough to leave a viable margin once revenue is split with the publisher, the advertiser demand is fulfilled, and Taboola takes its share. Extending the same monetization layer to outside AI platforms multiplies the volume of queries that need to be served this way, which places additional weight on the GPU infrastructure NVIDIA and Taboola have built together.

Where this sits in Taboola's broader AI push

The June 16 announcement did not arrive in isolation. It follows a sequence of product launches through which Taboola has steadily expanded its AI and automation capabilities across both the demand and supply sides of its business. In April 2026, the company launched Realize+, an agentic AI system for open web performance campaigns, paired with a Claude Skills integration - part of what the company has described as its broader agentic roadmap. Around the same period, DeeperDive crossed the 7 million monthly active user mark and expanded into new languages, a milestone that positioned the tool, in Taboola's own comparative figures, well behind the scale of ChatGPT and Gemini but ahead of some other conversational AI products by active user count.

Publisher adoption of the underlying DeeperDive product has also broadened steadily since the original June 2025 launch. Gannett's USA TODAY Network and The Independent served as the first deployment partners. The Bangkok Post became the first Southeast Asian publisher to adopt the technology in November 2025. UK publisher Reach, which operates titles including Express and Daily Star, deployed DeeperDive in February 2026 as referral traffic from external search continued to decline across the industry. HuffPost UK adopted the system in April 2026, describing it as a way to claw back readers and advertising revenue lost to AI search platforms operated by other companies.

That publisher-side pattern helps explain why Taboola frames the June 16 expansion as a natural next step rather than a pivot. The company has spent roughly a year proving, through its own publisher deployments, that a conversational AI interface can be paired with contextual advertising without degrading the reading experience or requiring a subscription fee from users. Having tested that model across thousands of publisher sites, Taboola is now offering the same commercial plumbing to AI companies that build products with no publisher relationship at all.

What Taboola's CEO said about the announcement

According to the company's announcement, Adam Singolda situated the move within a larger argument about how the AI industry will eventually sustain itself financially. "Today's news is about helping build the economic layer of the AI internet," Singolda said. "The future of the internet will be increasingly conversational and agentic. While AI companies have made incredible progress building products consumers love, many are still looking for sustainable business models. Consumers won't subscribe to every AI service they use, creating a significant opportunity for advertising and commerce to help fund innovation."

Singolda continued by pointing directly to DeeperDive's own track record as the proof point for extending the model elsewhere. "DeeperDive has proven that AI experiences can successfully connect users with trusted content and relevant commercial ads," he said. "We're now bringing that monetization infrastructure to the broader AI ecosystem, helping AI applications, agents, and LLM-powered services grow while creating value for users, advertisers, and publishers."

Those two statements together outline the wager underneath the announcement. Rather than positioning DeeperDive purely as a publisher retention tool, Taboola is now arguing that its advertising infrastructure can function as a general-purpose revenue layer that any conversational AI product can adopt, regardless of whether that product originated from a news organization at all.

Cannes Lions and the broader industry backdrop

Taboola timed the announcement to precede the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which ran from June 22 to 26, 2026, in Cannes, France, telling press that it would spotlight the news alongside programming featuring brand and publishing executives at the festival. That timing placed Taboola's announcement inside a dense cluster of advertising technology news that characterized the run-up to Cannes. WPP Media published a midyear forecast on June 16, 2026 - the same day as Taboola's announcement - projecting global advertising would reach $1.3 trillion in 2026, naming AI investment as the primary driver of that growth, as PPC Land reported. The following day, June 17, DoubleVerify launched its DV Neura cognitive AI engine with agentic execution capabilities.

The pattern extended into the festival itself. PPC Land's coverage of the opening day, June 22, described an advertising industry running two parallel efforts: loud, fast product announcements on one side, involving AI placements scaling, autonomous agents entering media buying workflows, and shoppable screens spreading across devices; and a slower, less visible effort on the other side, involving the measurement infrastructure, attribution fixes, and legal scaffolding still being assembled to make that automation verifiable. Taboola's decision to open its monetization layer to outside AI companies fits within the first category - an infrastructure bet made ahead of the instruments that would fully validate it.

The unresolved monetization problem across generative AI

The context Singolda described - AI companies with popular products but no clear path to sustainable revenue - is not a hypothetical framing device. It reflects a structural gap that has been building across the generative AI sector since well before this announcement. Multiple companies have launched answer engine optimization tools over the preceding months specifically because AI-driven discovery has been reshaping how consumers find information and, increasingly, how they research purchases, without a settled model for how the underlying AI platforms themselves generate revenue from that shift.

Taboola's own account of DeeperDive's usage patterns offers a partial illustration of the commercial opportunity it is describing. According to Taboola's April 2026 disclosure, approximately 50% of user questions on DeeperDive concern the last 24 hours of news, entertainment, and sports, with politics, sports, finance, entertainment, and shopping ranking as the most popular question categories. Publishers integrating the tool have seen engagement rates of up to 17%, according to the company - meaning roughly one in six readers continues interacting with a publisher's site after an initial article, a figure Taboola has previously noted stands well above historical recirculation rates that had remained in the low single digits for roughly three decades.

Those engagement figures matter directly to the June 16 announcement because they form the evidentiary basis for Taboola's pitch to outside AI companies. The argument is not simply that advertising can be inserted into AI answers technically; it is that Taboola has already measured, across a publisher network reaching more than 7 million monthly users, that doing so does not collapse engagement, and in fact correlates with some of the highest advertiser conversion rates across the company's broader network. Whether that same dynamic holds when the AI answer engine in question is a general-purpose chatbot rather than a publisher-embedded tool drawing on trusted editorial content is a distinct question that the June 16 announcement does not, on its own, resolve.

Scale and reach

Taboola describes itself as a global leader in delivering performance advertising at scale, working directly with thousands of businesses that advertise on Realize and reaching approximately 600 million daily active users across major publishers worldwide. Those publishers include NBC News and Yahoo, alongside original equipment manufacturers such as Samsung and Xiaomi that use Taboola's technology to grow audience and advertising revenue. That existing network - which the company has built over roughly a decade, according to prior statements from Singolda - is the foundation the newly opened AI monetization layer draws upon. Any conversational AI platform integrating with Taboola's system gains access, in principle, to demand relationships that took years to establish, rather than needing to build an independent advertiser base from scratch.

The scale of DeeperDive's own footprint provides a further reference point. The system draws from Taboola's network of more than 9,000 publisher partners globally, according to the company, and that publisher footprint is what supplies both the editorial content DeeperDive uses to answer queries and the first-party behavioral data that feeds Taboola's intent graph. Whether that same depth of signal transfers cleanly to a third-party AI platform with no publisher relationship of its own - one that might be answering questions using a general web index rather than a single trusted archive - is a technical distinction that separates DeeperDive's original design from the broader monetization offer Taboola announced on June 16.

Timeline

  • June 11, 2025 - Taboola launches DeeperDive, an AI answer engine designed to live directly on publisher websites, with Gannett and The Independent as launch partners.
  • October 15, 2025 - Taboola expands its Realize advertising platform with deepened partnerships covering TIME, Weather Channel Digital, Gannett, Nexstar, and Slate.
  • November 18, 2025 - The Bangkok Post becomes the first Southeast Asian publisher to deploy DeeperDive.
  • February 11, 2026 - UK publisher Reach deploys DeeperDive across properties including Express and Daily Star.
  • April 8, 2026 - Taboola announces DeeperDive has reached nearly 7 million monthly active users and expands the product into six new languages.
  • April 14, 2026 - HuffPost UK adopts DeeperDive as the tool expands across European publishers.
  • April 23, 2026 - Taboola launches Realize+, an agentic AI system for open web performance campaigns, alongside a Claude Skills integration.
  • June 16, 2026 - Taboola announces it is opening the monetization engine behind DeeperDive to outside generative AI companies, including conversational AI, chatbot, and virtual assistant providers.
  • June 18, 2026 - NVIDIA publishes details of its advertising technology partnerships, including Taboola's use of GPU infrastructure for DeeperDive, ahead of Cannes Lions 2026.
  • June 22-26, 2026 - Taboola spotlights the announcement during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France.

Summary

Who: Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA), a performance advertising technology company, led by chief executive Adam Singolda. The announcement targets generative AI companies broadly, including providers of conversational AI, chatbots, and virtual assistants.

What: Taboola opened the monetization infrastructure behind DeeperDive, its generative AI answer engine, to outside AI platforms, allowing them to insert advertising directly into their conversational responses using Taboola's Realize demand network, its proprietary intent graph, and NVIDIA-powered inference infrastructure.

When: The announcement was made on June 16, 2026. It follows DeeperDive's original launch on June 11, 2025, and its April 8, 2026 milestone of nearly 7 million monthly active users.

Where: The announcement was made public through Taboola's press communications and was scheduled to be spotlighted during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, held in Cannes, France, from June 22 to 26, 2026.

Why: According to Taboola, many generative AI companies have built products with strong user adoption but no sustainable revenue model, since consumers are unwilling to pay subscription fees for every AI service they use. By opening its advertising monetization layer - already tested across a publisher network reaching more than 7 million monthly users and 9,000 publisher partners - to outside AI companies, Taboola is positioning its infrastructure as a potential revenue foundation for the wider conversational AI industry, ahead of a broader unresolved question about how that industry sustains itself financially.