Wikitree this week selected DeeperDive, the generative AI answer engine built by Taboola, becoming one of the first Korean-language publishers to deploy the tool since the company added Korean to the platform in April 2026. The agreement, announced July 1, 2026, places the South Korean outlet inside a network that Taboola says was approaching 7 million monthly active users as of April this year, a fraction of the scale claimed by dominant conversational AI products but a growing presence among publishers trying to keep readers from leaving for search engines and chatbots altogether.

According to Taboola, DeeperDive is a Gen AI answer engine that lives directly on publisher websites and leverages their own content, rather than aggregating material from across the internet the way general-purpose AI search tools typically do. Wikitree will use the technology to increase readership and engagement while opening additional revenue streams, the company said. As a cornerstone of Taboola's Agentic roadmap, the tool is designed to transform publishers' trusted content into an interactive discovery experience, meeting evolving reader expectations for depth, trust, and a stronger sense of community, according to the announcement.

What DeeperDive does on a publisher site

The mechanics have not changed since Taboola first introduced the product a year earlier. DeeperDive brings the power of generative AI search engines directly onto publisher websites, tapping into years of proprietary, high-quality content created by journalists and editors, according to the company. Readers can ask questions about topics they are interested in, and the system provides answers instantly, sourced from those same trusted journalists rather than from a web-wide index. The interface also prompts questions that may be of interest to readers, delivers direct responses, and surfaces additional context and stories from the same publisher site, Taboola said.

Every reader question is met with an answer alongside links to relevant and timely articles from across the publisher's site, which the company describes as a way to keep users engaged longer and encourage deeper content exploration. That structure differs from how conventional AI search engines operate. Instead of synthesizing a single response from thousands of external sources, DeeperDive confines each interaction to one publisher's own archive, an approach PPC Land reported was central to the product's design when Gannett and The Independent became its first launch partners in June 2025.

For Wikitree specifically, the partnership marks a return on the six-language expansion Taboola announced three months earlier. When DeeperDive reached nearly 7 million monthly active users in April 2026, the company simultaneously opened the product to French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish, with publishers in France, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Spanish-speaking markets joining that wave. Wikitree's deployment is among the first concrete Korean-market results of that language rollout to be announced publicly.

Two named executives, two framings of the same deal

Dong-Ki Lee, identified in the announcement as CEO of Wikitree, described the shift in terms of a longer editorial project. "We have spent years ensuring that our content goes 'from the moment to conversations.' This has meant creating content that resonates with our growing number of readers," Lee said, according to the press release. "We are now taking a giant leap forward with Taboola and DeeperDive. For the first time, our readers can have conversations with our news directly, discovering more about topics they care about, using an innovative generative AI experience. Taboola was the perfect partner to power this thanks to their rich history in providing technology to publishers."

Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola, framed the deal within a broader argument the company has made to nearly every publisher partner it has announced over the past year: that adopting a native AI interface is a matter of competitive positioning, not merely product experimentation. "Wikitree is taking their rich history of delivering quality content and with DeeperDive, offering it to readers in a completely new, appealing and innovative way," Singolda said, according to the announcement. "Publishers who adopt DeeperDive aren't just keeping up with the GenAI revolution, they're leading it, on their terms. We're creating a new user habit, one where readers lean in, ask follow-up questions, and stay to explore. We're also giving publishers the potential to unlock even more ways to grow."

That phrasing echoes near-identical language Singolda has used in prior DeeperDive announcements, including Reach's deployment across Express and Daily Star in February 2026 and the Bangkok Post's deal the previous November, both of which credited partner publishers with "taking their rich history of delivering quality content" and offering it in "a completely new, appealing and innovative way." The repetition suggests a standardized commercial pitch applied across a growing publisher roster rather than language crafted uniquely for each deal.

Where the monetization argument sits

According to the announcement, DeeperDive is designed to unlock high-intent ad revenue opportunities by inserting contextually relevant ads directly into the AI-powered results page, alongside its stated goals of delivering more diverse reader answers and increasing publisher engagement. That monetization argument is where the commercial logic of the product sits. Taboola has previously quantified the scale of the opportunity in comparative terms; when the company expanded DeeperDive to seven million monthly users in April, it disclosed that publishers integrating the tool were seeing engagement rates of up to 17 percent, a figure the company contrasted against recirculation rates that have historically sat in the low single digits for roughly three decades across the publishing industry. Whether Wikitree will see comparable engagement figures once its own deployment is live is not addressed in the July 1 announcement, which describes the partnership prospectively rather than reporting results.

Context: why publishers keep signing these deals

Wikitree's decision arrives inside an industry-wide pattern rather than as an isolated experiment. Since DeeperDive's June 2025 debut, publisher adoption has moved steadily outward from its initial launch partners. Gannett's USA TODAY Network and The Independent were first. The Bangkok Post followed in November 2025, becoming the first Southeast Asian deployment. Reach, the United Kingdom's largest commercial news publisher, added the tool across Express and Daily Star in February 2026. HuffPost UK joined in April. Each announcement has cited the same underlying pressure: declining referral traffic from search engines that increasingly answer queries directly on the results page rather than sending users to publisher websites.

That pressure has intensified rather than eased over the past year. A study PPC Land covered this week found that Google's AI Overviews cut publisher clicks by 39.8 percent in a randomized field experiment involving more than a thousand desktop Chrome users, with zero-click searches rising 34.5 percent whenever the feature appeared. Unlike earlier observational research on the same question, that study randomly assigned users to see or not see AI-generated summaries, which the researchers argued produces a causal estimate rather than a correlation drawn from before-and-after traffic comparisons.

The trajectory of that number matters for understanding why a publisher would adopt an on-site alternative rather than simply waiting out the disruption. Ahrefs, the search analytics firm, first measured a 34.5 percent click-through rate reduction for AI Overview-triggering keywords in April 2025. By its own follow-up analysis in February 2026, that figure had grown to 58 percent, according to PPC Land's coverage of the updated research. Separately, Chartbeat data cited in Press Gazette figures found that traditional Google Search traffic dropped from roughly 16 percent to 10 percent of total referrals across all publisher types over a comparable period, a decline that has pushed some publishers toward more severe outcomes; one specialized site tracked by PPC Land saw traffic collapse by more than 97 percent within fifteen months after AI Overviews began surfacing its content directly in search results, according to reporting on the phenomenon.

DeeperDive is positioned, in Taboola's own framing, as a countermeasure to exactly that dynamic: instead of losing the reader interaction to an external AI product, the publisher captures the conversational query itself. Whether that captured interaction generates advertising revenue at a scale comparable to what was lost through declining search referrals is a separate question the July 1 announcement does not attempt to answer with Wikitree-specific figures.

Scale relative to competing AI products

Taboola has been transparent, in prior disclosures, about where DeeperDive sits relative to the AI products it competes with for reader attention. According to comparative data the company published alongside its April 2026 milestone, ChatGPT led with an estimated 810 million monthly active users, followed by Gemini at 750 million, Grok at 60 million, Perplexity at 30 million, and Claude at 20 million, with DeeperDive itself at approximately 7 million. That gap has not closed dramatically in the months since. Singolda acknowledged the disparity directly at the time, writing on LinkedIn that the company was "not at the scale of Perplexity (yet)," according to PPC Land's report on the milestone.

The structural argument Taboola makes in response to that scale gap is that DeeperDive is not attempting to compete as a standalone destination. Because the tool lives embedded within a publisher's own site rather than functioning as an external app or chatbot, its usage figures reflect a different kind of product entirely: one measured in incremental engagement layered onto existing publisher traffic, rather than in total addressable audience competing head-to-head against general-purpose assistants. Roughly half of DeeperDive user questions concern the last 24 hours of news, entertainment, and sports, according to Taboola's own April disclosure, a distribution that reflects the news-adjacent nature of the sites where the tool has so far been deployed.

Company background

Taboola trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker TBLA and describes itself as a company that empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social, delivering measurable outcomes at scale. The company said it works with thousands of businesses that advertise directly on Realize, its advertising platform, reaching approximately 600 million daily active users across some of the largest publishers in the world. Publishers including NBC News and Yahoo, along with original equipment manufacturers such as Samsung and Xiaomi, use Taboola's technology to grow audience and revenue, according to the company.

Taboola's broader momentum through the first half of 2026 has included several developments beyond DeeperDive's publisher rollout. The company reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of 466.4 million dollars, a 9.1 percent increase year-over-year, alongside a one-time 77 million dollar legal settlement that boosted headline net income. It also launched Realize+, an agentic advertising system, in April, and was added to the Russell 3000 and Russell 2000 indexes effective June 26, 2026, following a June 3 announcement.

What the announcement does not specify

The July 1 press release does not disclose commercial terms of the Wikitree agreement, a rollout timeline for the Korean-language deployment, or projected user or revenue figures specific to the partnership. It also does not specify whether Wikitree's implementation launches immediately or at a later date, nor does it detail how the Korean-language interface differs technically from DeeperDive's English-language version beyond the underlying language model support Taboola introduced in April.

Timeline

  • June 11, 2025: Taboola launches DeeperDive, an AI answer engine designed to live directly on publisher websites, with Gannett's USA TODAY Network and The Independent as launch partners.
  • November 18, 2025: The Bangkok Post becomes the first Southeast Asian publisher to deploy DeeperDive.
  • February 11, 2026: Reach, the United Kingdom's largest commercial news publisher, deploys DeeperDive across Express and Daily Star.
  • April 8, 2026: Taboola announces DeeperDive has reached nearly 7 million monthly active users and expands the product to six new languages, including Korean.
  • April 14, 2026: HuffPost UK adopts DeeperDive as the product's European rollout continues.
  • May 6, 2026: Taboola reports first-quarter 2026 revenue of 466.4 million dollars, up 9.1 percent year-over-year.
  • June 3, 2026: Taboola announces its inclusion in the Russell 3000 and Russell 2000 indexes, effective June 26.
  • July 1, 2026: Taboola announces that Wikitree has selected DeeperDive, becoming one of the first Korean-language publisher deployments since the April language expansion.

Summary

Who: Wikitree, a South Korean digital publisher, and Taboola (Nasdaq: TBLA), a New York-based performance advertising technology company led by CEO and founder Adam Singolda. Dong-Ki Lee is identified as CEO of Wikitree in the announcement.

What: Wikitree selected DeeperDive, Taboola's generative AI answer engine that lives directly on publisher websites and generates responses exclusively from a publisher's own content archive. The deployment makes Wikitree one of the first Korean-language publishers on the platform since Taboola added Korean-language support in April 2026.

When: The partnership was announced July 1, 2026, according to the press release distributed through GlobeNewswire.

Where: Wikitree operates in South Korea. Taboola is headquartered in New York and trades on the Nasdaq.

Why: The deal fits a pattern across the publishing industry of adopting on-site AI answer tools to retain readers and advertising revenue that has been eroding as search engines increasingly answer user queries directly within results pages rather than directing traffic to publisher websites. Independent research, including a randomized study finding AI Overviews cut publisher clicks by 39.8 percent, has documented that erosion accelerating through 2026, giving publishers like Wikitree a specific commercial reason to test alternatives that keep reader interactions on their own properties.