Yahoo today launched the first version of its AI-powered answer engine, Yahoo Scout. Scout is available at scout.yahoo.com and is embedded across Yahoo\u2019s network, including Yahoo News, Finance, Mail, and Search. Think of it as a Yahoo-branded AI companion designed to guide users directly within Yahoo\u2019s properties.<\/p>
What is Yahoo Scout. <\/strong>Yahoo Scout is Yahoo\u2019s take on an AI search engine and companion, similar to Google\u2019s AI Mode or OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, but with a distinct Yahoo flair. The goal is to give Scout a real personality \u2014 fun, engaging, and easy for people of all ages to use and understand, Yahoo told me.<\/p> Here\u2019s a screenshot of the homepage. This one features a cowboy hat, but other versions include a crystal ball, a gold medal, a walking cartoon brain, and more.<\/p> Yahoo Scout\u2019s advantage. <\/strong>The Yahoo Search team gave me early access to Yahoo Scout. While the interface feels familiar if you\u2019ve used competing tools, the Yahoo-specific elements clearly set it apart.<\/p> Yahoo\u2019s advantage over many AI search competitors is its massive, built-in audience across Mail, News, Finance, and Search. It has more than 500 million user profiles and deep data on queries, usage, intent, and behavior. Yahoo also maintains over one billion knowledge-graph entities and tracks 18 trillion consumer events and signals across its properties. Together, this gives Yahoo the ability to deliver more personal AI-driven search experiences and more accurately categorize queries.<\/p> Yahoo is the second largest email company and third largest search engine, the company told me.<\/p> Yahoo Scout can pull rich content from across Yahoo directly into its responses. This includes features like Yahoo Finance widgets, detailed financial data, tables and citations, weather, news, and more.<\/p> Sending traffic to you, the publisher. <\/strong>Scout is closely tied to Yahoo\u2019s original mission: being a trusted guide to the internet, Lanzone said. From the ground up, Yahoo built Scout to honor the open web by driving traffic downstream to content creators.<\/p> Yahoo Scout responses use large, wide blue highlights across the text. When you hover over them, you can click through to the original source. <\/p> Each response also includes a \u201cfeatured source\u201d that\u2019s easy to spot and select. Scout further emphasizes content with tables and imagery while surfacing relevant news articles and sources throughout its answers.<\/p> Early AI search engines did little to send traffic back to the sources behind their answers, Lanzone said. Yahoo wanted to set an example for how to do this the right way. There isn\u2019t enough revenue for every publisher to rely on licensing deals with AI companies, and historically, the model that worked best was simple: send traffic back to the original sources.<\/p> Here\u2019s an example of how Yahoo Scout links to its sources:<\/p> When you hover over the blue highlights, the source appears, and you can click through to visit it. The purple \u201cRead more\u201d featured-source section also aims to drive traffic downstream.<\/p> CTR expectations. <\/strong>I asked Yahoo about the expected click-through rate from Scout to publishers. They said they don\u2019t know yet. Yahoo plans to learn from real-world usage once Scout goes public and iterate to improve downstream clicks. This is Scout\u2019s first release, and real user data should be telling.<\/p> They expect queries in Yahoo Scout to be longer than in Yahoo Search, with lighter ad loads and a much higher click-through rate than the industry average. <\/p> Yahoo also told me it plans to give publishers access to impression and click data in the future, possibly through a Yahoo Webmaster Tools\u2013style product. Crawling and indexing would remain separate, since that layer is still powered by Microsoft Bing.<\/p> Yahoo Scout in every Yahoo property. <\/strong>You\u2019ll be able to access Yahoo Scout across all Yahoo properties.<\/p> Examples of Yahoo Scout in action. <\/strong>Here are a few examples of Yahoo Scout. It\u2019s not perfect, but for a six-month project, I\u2019m impressed.<\/p> I asked Scout for help explaining how SEO works, and it delivered a solid response. SEO is complex, and not everyone will agree with every detail, but the answer was thoughtful and useful. There are citations throughout the summary:<\/p> I then asked it to share sources for finding content on the topic as a follow-up. There were clear missed opportunities to link out more, which I pointed out to Yahoo, and they agreed.<\/p> I asked Yahoo Scout how to navigate to the sources it mentioned, and at that point, it did provide links:<\/p> Here\u2019s a screenshot of another citation that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over it.<\/p> Here are some other searches I tried:<\/p> I was able to get a Yahoo Weather chart:<\/p> With tips on how to stay warm:<\/p> As a lifelong Jets fan, I asked whether the team has any chance of winning the Super Bowl in the next 10 years. The answer wasn\u2019t encouraging, but I was happy to see a chart embedded directly in the response.<\/p> Ads and commissions. <\/strong>Yahoo Scout will show ads at the bottom of some responses. It will also monetize commerce-related queries through affiliate commissions, a common web revenue model.<\/p> Here is a screenshot of a Progressive Insurance ad for questions about car insurance.<\/p> Here is a screenshot of product results that are labeled, \u201cYahoo may earn commission from these links.\u201d<\/p> How Yahoo Scout came about. <\/strong>For about three years now, Yahoo has been hinting about making a return to the search game. In 2009, Yahoo made a deal with Microsoft to have Microsoft power Yahoo Search and that was the end of Yahoo building its own search technology. Literally, Yahoo has outsources Search since then and has not done its own search technology until now, with Yahoo Scout.<\/p> That is until now. About six month ago, Yahoo acquired Eric Feng\u2019s company to lead up consumer search at Yahoo. Eric Feng is known for co-founding an online video platform startup called Mojiti, which was acquired by Hulu in 2007, in which Eric became the founding CTO and head of product at Hulu. But before that, he worked at Microsoft in the Research labs, working on solving problems with Search.<\/p> \u201cYahoo\u2019s deep knowledge base, 30 years in the making, allows us to deliver guidance that our users can trust and easily understand, and will become even more personalized over the coming months,\u201d said Eric Feng, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Research Group, the creators of Yahoo Scout. \u201cYahoo Scout now powers a new generation of intelligence experiences across Yahoo, seamlessly integrated into the products people use every day.\u201d<\/p> Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo, who in his own right has a long history in search, as the CEO of Ask.com for many years, told me that Eric Feng has been instrumental in building out Yahoo Scout in the past 6 months. And there is so much more to come, this is just the first public release and you can expect many more interations and improvements to Yahoo Scout in the near future.<\/p> Anthropic<\/strong>. Yahoo Scout is not built on its own LLM, Yahoo partnered with Anthropic to use Claude as Yahoo Scout\u2019s primary foundational AI model. Anthropic is one of the top artificial intelligence companies in the market. It has arguably the best AI for coders and coding frameworks named Claude. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who serve as president and CEO, respectively. In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion. Google committed $2 billion the next month. As of November 2025, Anthropic has an estimated value of $350 billion.<\/p> While the foundational AI models use Anthropic, Yahoo has customized it and incorporates Yahoo\u2019s proprietary data to make it unique and useful. Doing these searches on Anthropic will not give you anywhere close to the same experience as you would get on Yahoo Scout.<\/p> \u201cWhen you\u2019re serving hundreds of millions of users, you need AI that can do more than retrieve information \u2013 it has to reason, synthesize, and explain. Yahoo is building toward a more personalized, trustworthy kind of search, and Claude\u2019s ability to deliver that quality of guidance at scale is at the heart of Yahoo Scout,\u201d said Ami Vora, Head of Product at Anthropic.<\/p> Microsoft Bing<\/strong>. Plus, Microsoft Bing data is also incorporated into Yahoo Scout. The underlining search index is from Bing, but the responses, ranking, and experience is all Yahoo. \u201cYahoo Scout also builds on Yahoo\u2019s long-standing relationship with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft Bing\u2019s grounding API. By combining this API with Yahoo\u2019s trusted data and content ecosystem, Yahoo Scout ensures that answers are informed by authoritative sources from across the open web, Yahoo wrote.<\/p> Plus, Yahoo is also joining Microsoft\u2019s Publisher Content Marketplace pilot. Microsoft\u2019s Publisher Content Marketplace can help support revenue for publishers, the company said. Yahoo wrote this is, \u201creflecting a shared commitment to expanding publisher reach, connecting original work with new audiences, and supporting sustainable revenue opportunities for publishers.\u201d<\/p> Hallucinations. <\/strong>I asked about hallucinations and Yahoo told me they put in a lot of guardrails to prevent hallucinations as much as possible. The Yahoo entity graph, the news content, and other Yahoo-specific data are used to ground the responses so that communications should be minimal and less than some other AI engines. In fact, they believe the hallucination rate would be \u201cvery low\u201d compared to other AI engines.<\/p> Agents. <\/strong>Many AI engines are releasing agentic experiences, AI agents, to complete tasks for you. Google, OpenAI and Microsoft are investing big time into this.<\/p> Yahoo Scout has added some elements of this including inside of Yahoo Mail to add calendar events, smart compose features and more. Yahoo promises a lot more to come on this front.<\/p> Why we care. <\/strong>It\u2019s an exciting time for search. For someone like me who has spent more than 20 years in search, it\u2019s nice to see Yahoo step back into the space. Watching industry veterans like Jim Lanzone, Eric Feng, and Brian Provost take on search with AI is making it fun again, and I\u2019m excited to see what Yahoo does next.<\/p> Availability.<\/strong> The Yahoo Scout answer engine is available today in beta for U.S. users at\u00a0Scout.Yahoo.com\u00a0and in the Yahoo Search app on\u00a0iOS and Android.\u00a0For more about Yahoo Scout, see this help document.<\/p> <\/div> Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page\u2019s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.<\/em> <\/p> News#Yahoo #Scout #Yahoos #return #search #web #discovery1769626868<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yahoo today launched the first version of its AI-powered answer engine, Yahoo Scout. Scout is available at scout.yahoo.com and is embedded across Yahoo\u2019s network, including Yahoo News, Finance, Mail, and Search. Think of it as a Yahoo-branded AI companion designed to guide users directly within Yahoo\u2019s properties. What is Yahoo Scout. Yahoo Scout is Yahoo\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[6702,83,6701,6601,95,345,6600,6700],"class_list":["post-2384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-careers","tag-discovery","tag-news","tag-return","tag-scout","tag-search","tag-web","tag-yahoo","tag-yahoos"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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