Introducing Yahoo Scout, a New AI Answer Engine

Key Takeaways

• Fueled by Yahoo’s unique data, content, user insights and deep search history, Yahoo Scout is available now in beta 
• Yahoo also launches the Yahoo Scout Intelligence Platform across Yahoo Mail, News, Finance, Sports and more
• Yahoo expands AI search capabilities through new partnerships with Anthropic and Microsoft

Today, Yahoo Inc. debuted Yahoo Scout, a new, proprietary AI-powered answer engine. Available in beta and built on Yahoo’s unique data and user insights, as well as over 30 years of history in search, Yahoo Scout is rolling out across both Yahoo Search and the entire Yahoo portfolio. It is available to all of the company’s nearly 250 million users in the United States¹ on desktop and mobile.

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As search results shift from links to answers and search terms to natural language queries, Yahoo Scout synthesizes information from the open web, Yahoo data and Yahoo content to guide people with clear, concise responses. Yahoo Scout is presented in an intuitive format that includes rich media, structured content in lists and tables, and transparent sources that make information easier to understand, trust, and act on.

Yahoo Scout is uniquely shaped by Yahoo’s three decades of user insights and deep understanding of how people search, discover, make decisions and accomplish goals online. It brings together the best of traditional web search and generative AI search to deliver the right information and assistance at the right time for Yahoo’s vast user base, which reaches 90 percent of U.S. internet users each month². It's informed by 500 million user profiles, a knowledge graph spanning more than 1 billion entities, and 18 trillion consumer events that occur annually across Yahoo³, which allow Yahoo Scout to provide effective and personalized answers and suggested actions.

“Search is fundamentally changing, and our team has been inspired to use our decades of experience and extremely rare assets to create something uniquely useful for Yahoo’s hundreds of millions of monthly users,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. “This beta launch is just the starting point. From search to our industry-leading verticals, Yahoo Scout will help our users accomplish their goals online faster and better than ever before.”

“Yahoo’s 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,” said Eric Feng, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Research Group, the creators of Yahoo Scout. “Yahoo Scout now powers a new generation of intelligence experiences across Yahoo, seamlessly integrated into the products people use every day.”

Drawing directly from Yahoo’s owned and operated properties, Yahoo Scout continues Yahoo's focus on the moments that matter to people’s daily lives, such as understanding upcoming weather patterns before a vacation, getting details about an important game, tracking stock price movements after earnings, comparing products before buying, or fact-checking a news story.

An Intelligence Platform Across Yahoo

The company also announced today the launch of the Yahoo Scout Intelligence Platform, which combines advanced AI capabilities with all of Yahoo’s leading vertical experiences - including Mail, News, Finance, Sports and more - powering smart features that provide clarity and context such as AI summaries in Yahoo Mail, Game Breakdowns in Yahoo Sports, Key Takeaways in Yahoo News, as well as new features such as:

• Yahoo Shopping, powered by Yahoo Scout, which instantly delivers research that typically takes shoppers hours to do on their own, distilling insights from expert articles and user discussions across the web to compare brands and products and provide shoppable links to make purchases. No more opening endless tabs, sifting through sponsored products, or reading hundreds of reviews.  Yahoo Scout provides trusted analysis and surfaces top picks with clear reasoning, transforming hours of research into seconds of decision-making. 

• Analysis by Yahoo Scout, embedded within Yahoo Finance, which delivers clarity when investors need it most. This feature provides one-click access to real-time insights spanning company news, analyst ratings, financials, and earnings calls. Key signals are synthesized into clear analysis with headlines that refresh every 10 minutes and stock movements explained as they happen, helping investors make faster and smarter decisions.

• More from Yahoo Scout, a new feature that turns everyday market news into an interactive research experience. Built directly into articles across Yahoo Finance, it lets users instantly explore deeper insights through AI-powered questions, uncovering key takeaways, stock performance context, and broader market implications. By removing friction from discovery, Yahoo Scout makes complex stories easier to understand and helps investors move beyond headlines to meaning.

• Comment Summaries, featured within select articles on the Yahoo homepage, which capture the conversation happening around a story. With Yahoo articles regularly attracting hundreds of comments, keeping up with the discussion can be time-consuming. Now readers can quickly scan a concise snapshot highlighting key perspectives and themes emerging from the conversation.

Yahoo Announces First AI Partnerships

Yahoo also announced today that it has partnered with Anthropic to use Claude as Yahoo Scout’s primary foundational AI model. Yahoo selected Claude for its speed, clarity, judgment, and safety, qualities essential for a consumer answer engine where trust and reliability matter.

"When you're serving hundreds of millions of users, you need AI that can do more than retrieve information – it has to reason, synthesize, and explain. Yahoo is building toward a more personalized, trustworthy kind of search, and Claude's ability to deliver that quality of guidance at scale is at the heart of Yahoo Scout," said Ami Vora, Head of Product at Anthropic.

Yahoo Scout also builds on Yahoo’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft Bing’s grounding API. By combining this API with Yahoo’s trusted data and content ecosystem, Yahoo Scout ensures that answers are informed by authoritative sources from across the open web. Yahoo is also joining Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace pilot, reflecting a shared commitment to expanding publisher reach, connecting original work with new audiences, and supporting sustainable revenue opportunities for publishers.

Availability and What’s Next

Yahoo Scout will continue to evolve in the months ahead, expanding to power new products across Yahoo. In particular, the new answer engine will become more personalized, will add new capabilities focused on deeper experiences within key verticals, and will introduce new, improved opportunities for search advertisers to effectively cross the chasm to generative AI search advertising. 

The Yahoo Scout answer engine is available today in beta for U.S. users at Scout.Yahoo.com and in the Yahoo Search app on iOS and Android. 

Learn more at scout.yahoo.com/about.

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^{1 Comscore Media Metrix ® Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Top 100 properties, TDP Total Unique Visitors/Viewers inclusive of Social Incremental, Average Jan-2025 to Dec-2025, U.S.
2 Comscore Media Metrix ® Multi-Platform, TDP Total Unique Visitors/Viewers inclusive of Social Incremental, and % Reach, Top 100 properties, Average Jan-2025 to Dec-2025, U.S.
3 Yahoo Internal Data}

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