"The publishing company behind USA Today and 220 other publications is today rolling out a chatbot-like tool called DeeperDive that can converse with readers, summarize insights from its journalism, and suggest new content from across its sites. "Visitors now have a trusted AI answer engine on our platform for anything they want to engage with, anything they want to ask," Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett and the USA Today Network, said at the WIRED AI Power Summit in New York, an event that brought together voices from the tech industry, politics, and the world of media. "and it is performing really great.""
"Most publishers have a fraught relationship with AI, as the chatbots that trained on their content are now summarizing it and eating the traffic that search engines used to send them. Reed said that Google's AI Overview feature has dramatically cut traffic to publishers across the industry. "We are watching the same movie as everyone else is watching," Reed said ahead of today's announcement. "We can see some risk in the future to any content distribution model that is based primarily on SEO optimization." Like other publishers, Gannett has signed some deals with AI companies, including Amazon and Perplexity, to license its content. The company actively blocks the web scrapers that crawl websites in order to steal content."
Gannett launched DeeperDive, an AI-driven chatbot across USA Today Network sites that converses with readers, summarizes journalistic insights, and recommends related content. The tool replaces a traditional search box, suggests likely reader questions, and generates short answers paired with relevant stories from across the network. The company emphasizes factual accuracy and aims to prevent hallucinations. The rollout is part of a strategy to retain reader attention as AI features from other platforms and Google's AI Overview have reduced referral traffic. Gannett has pursued licensing deals with AI firms and actively blocks web scrapers that attempt to harvest content.
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