Today’s publishers are navigating one of the biggest shifts the industry has seen in decades. Generative AI-powered search engines are increasingly scraping content and answering questions directly, often reducing traffic back to publisher sites. At the same time, reader expectations are evolving. Publishers must innovate to keep audiences engaged, protect their direct relationships, and build sustainable revenue models.

I’m very excited to share that Nexstar Media Group has adopted Taboola’s DeeperDive and we now get to talk about it. 

Nexstar is one of the largest diversified media companies in the U.S., producing and distributing local and national news, sports, and entertainment. Its portfolio of digital properties, including local TV station websites across the country, ranks among the top digital news destinations in the United States.

For those less familiar, DeeperDive is Taboola’s generative AI answer engine built specifically for publishers. It allows readers to ask questions directly on the publisher’s site and get answers grounded in trusted content from that publisher and approved sources. It keeps the user experience on the publisher’s property, strengthens engagement, and from day one, generates meaningful revenue through contextual advertising powered by Realize.

Unlike consumer facing AI platforms that pull content away from publishers, DeeperDive is designed to strengthen the publisher’s relationship with their audience while unlocking new monetization opportunities.

I recently sat down with Jeff Moriarty, Chief Product Officer at Nexstar and a long-time partner and friend, to discuss how Nexstar is thinking about Gen AI, audience engagement, and why they chose to move forward with DeeperDive.

Jeff is one of those rare leaders who understands technology deeply, but always through a business lens.

With that, let’s take a “DeeperDive.”

Jeff, you have been testing DeeperDive as a Gen AI answer engine on Nexstar’s sites. What problem were you trying to solve, and why did DeeperDive feel like the right solution? What does success looks like for us in 12 months in your mind?

Like other publishers, we see our readers and viewers becoming accustomed to conversational interfaces to find information on Google, ChatGPT and elsewhere, and we think letting readers ask questions about our content on our own products is an extension of what we already do to deliver quality local information. 

We have looked at a number of ways to solve this but were drawn to the speed at which Taboola attacked this opportunity and that it can bring a vast pool of advertisers to monetize each question. It is incredibly helpful that Taboola already scans our pages and knows our users through our advertising relationship and that gives us a huge head start in launching something that works well and that has monetization built in. 

This is likely far from the end state of this type of interface, and just the beginning of our experimentation. We have to think about these types of products and ultimately how our content is made available to personal agents and other agentic tools as they continue to evolve. Taboola’s challenge is to stay out in front of this emerging area, while also creating  a higher standard of advertisers against the questions readers ask.  

You’ve previously spoken about Gen AI as a technology that could boost newsroom capabilities, create the next gen “super editor”. How are you thinking about using AI across the organization, from newsroom workflows to product, monetization, and audience engagement?

We’ve been very deliberate in our rollout of AI-powered tools, focusing on “background” integration—tools designed to augment the human intelligence in our newsrooms.

A perfect use of AI right now is to transform content we already have into other formats, like taking a long form video and making that into multiple clips, a text story, and creating assets for vertical platforms, social platforms, and so on.

By embedding these capabilities directly into our CMS, our digital editors are now utilizing AI thousands of times a day to automate high-volume, low-leverage tasks. This isn’t just about speed; it’s about reclaiming editorial bandwidth, allowing our creators to focus on original reporting while the technology helps with the multi-platform orchestration.

AI has moved fast, and not everyone adapts at the same pace. What has the learning curve been like at Nexstar? Have you seen certain teams or individuals become early champions and help bring others along?

If a tool demonstrably enhances the quality of an editor’s output or removes a friction point in their production cycle, the “curve” vanishes and adoption happens organically. We look at this like any product and are constantly surveying our newsrooms for feedback on what is working and what is not. 

While we maintain uncompromising guardrails around our core journalism, we’ve found significant opportunities for innovation within our marketing and creative divisions. These teams are utilizing AI to compress production cycles for previously very expensive motion graphics and video effects.

Beyond Gen AI, what do you think will define the next phase of innovation for publishers this year? Is it personalization, new formats, subscription strategy, monetization, something else?

It is always all of these – never just one of them – and is the synchronization of those strategies. 

We are in a unique position as one of the largest news gatherers in the U.S., with a vast library of video content created and distributed each day. 

Ultimately, AI is a bridge between our core journalism and its broadest possible impact. It allows us to optimize our existing library at scale, ensuring our content resonates with new users on the platforms where they already live.

Search traffic dynamics are changing fast. How are you thinking about protecting Nexstar’s direct relationship with audiences in an AI-driven world?

We do everything we can to protect our content from bots and scrapers using a best-in-class AI powered bot protection partner. There is very little incentive for us to right now give up our content to LLMs in terms of audience or monetization. 

Our best defense is an offensive approach that makes sure we get our local content to screens in the right format, with monetization figured out at the beginning, not at a later date. 

There is no doubt that AI summarization is changing how people get information – Our strategy is doubling down on E-E-A-T, as Google suggests. 

As the web becomes saturated with AI-generated content, we believe that focus on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness will still be a primary filter for value in these new interfaces.