Yahoo debuts Scout, an AI search and companion experience

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’s network, including Yahoo News, Finance, Mail, and Search. Think of it as a Yahoo-branded AI companion designed to guide users directly within Yahoo’s properties.

What is Yahoo Scout. Yahoo Scout is Yahoo’s take on an AI search engine and companion, similar to Google’s AI Mode or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but with a distinct Yahoo flair. The goal is to give Scout a real personality — fun, engaging, and easy for people of all ages to use and understand, Yahoo told me.

• When you first visit Yahoo Scout, you’re greeted by a playful homepage with a search box, a catchy slogan, and an animated icon that makes the experience feel friendly and inviting.
• Below the search box, Yahoo offers suggested searches, with filters for topics like news, finance, sports, shopping, and travel.
• On the left, Scout shows your past queries, making it easy to jump back in where you left off.

Here’s 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.

Yahoo Scout’s advantage. The Yahoo Search team gave me early access to Yahoo Scout. While the interface feels familiar if you’ve used competing tools, the Yahoo-specific elements clearly set it apart.

Yahoo’s 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.

Yahoo is the second largest email company and third largest search engine, the company told me.

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.

• “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. 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,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo.

Sending traffic to you, the publisher. Scout is closely tied to Yahoo’s 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.

Yahoo Scout responses use large, wide blue highlights across the text. When you hover over them, you can click through to the original source.

Each response also includes a “featured source” that’s easy to spot and select. Scout further emphasizes content with tables and imagery while surfacing relevant news articles and sources throughout its answers.

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’t 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.

Here’s an example of how Yahoo Scout links to its sources:

When you hover over the blue highlights, the source appears, and you can click through to visit it. The purple “Read more” featured-source section also aims to drive traffic downstream.

CTR expectations. I asked Yahoo about the expected click-through rate from Scout to publishers. They said they don’t know yet. Yahoo plans to learn from real-world usage once Scout goes public and iterate to improve downstream clicks. This is Scout’s first release, and real user data should be telling.

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.

Yahoo also told me it plans to give publishers access to impression and click data in the future, possibly through a Yahoo Webmaster Tools–style product. Crawling and indexing would remain separate, since that layer is still powered by Microsoft Bing.

Yahoo Scout in every Yahoo property. You’ll be able to access Yahoo Scout across all Yahoo properties.

• Yahoo Mail will summarize emails with AI and extract actionable items, such as adding events to your calendar.
• Yahoo Search will add AI summaries powered by Scout.
• Yahoo News will surface key article highlights and include the daily digest audio summary.
• Yahoo Finance will introduce a new Analyze button powered by Scout.

Examples of Yahoo Scout in action. Here are a few examples of Yahoo Scout. It’s not perfect, but for a six-month project, I’m impressed.

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:

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.

I asked Yahoo Scout how to navigate to the sources it mentioned, and at that point, it did provide links:

Here’s a screenshot of another citation that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over it.

Here are some other searches I tried:

• Entertainment: Scout incorporates news articles, with larger graphics in clickable card formats.

• Finance: Yahoo brings in Yahoo Finance. I was unable to generate stock charts, although in a demo I was given, I was shown that live. So maybe it was being worked on during my tests:

• Weather: I was testing this Sunday morning, as the big snow storm was touching down in New York:

I was able to get a Yahoo Weather chart:

With tips on how to stay warm:

• Sports: The Super Bowl is coming up, and I was hoping to get some predictions:

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’t encouraging, but I was happy to see a chart embedded directly in the response.

• Shopping: And then Yahoo gave me some advice on how to dress during this weather:

Ads and commissions. 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.

• Yahoo told me the ads are still powered by Microsoft Advertising, but Yahoo controls how those ads appear within these interfaces.
• These ads will be charged on a CPC basis, not an impression basis, as some other AI engines announced.

Here is a screenshot of a Progressive Insurance ad for questions about car insurance.

Here is a screenshot of product results that are labeled, “Yahoo may earn commission from these links.”

How Yahoo Scout came about. 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.

That is until now. About six month ago, Yahoo acquired Eric Feng’s 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.

“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.”

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.

Anthropic. Yahoo Scout is not built on its own LLM, Yahoo partnered with Anthropic to use Claude as Yahoo Scout’s 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.

While the foundational AI models use Anthropic, Yahoo has customized it and incorporates Yahoo’s 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.

“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.

Microsoft Bing. 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. “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 wrote.

Plus, Yahoo is also joining Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace pilot. Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace can help support revenue for publishers, the company said. Yahoo wrote this is, “reflecting a shared commitment to expanding publisher reach, connecting original work with new audiences, and supporting sustainable revenue opportunities for publishers.”

Hallucinations. 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 “very low” compared to other AI engines.

Agents. Many AI engines are releasing agentic experiences, AI agents, to complete tasks for you. Google, OpenAI and Microsoft are investing big time into this.

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.

Why we care. It’s an exciting time for search. For someone like me who has spent more than 20 years in search, it’s 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’m excited to see what Yahoo does next.

Availability. 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. For more about Yahoo Scout, see this help document.