Yahoo! Scout – Yahoo’s return to search and web discovery

Yahoo has launched its first version of its AI-based answer engine named Yahoo! Scout. Yahoo! Scout is available at scout.yahoo.com and is also embedded through Yahoo’s massive network of sites; Yahoo News, Finance, Mail and of course, Yahoo Search. Think of it as a Yahoo-branded AI companion for Yahoo users, that is there to help you along the way within those specific properties.

What is Yahoo Scout. Yahoo Scout is Yahoo’s take at an AI search engine and companion, much like Google’s AI Mode or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but with a flare from Yahoo. Yahoo told me that they wanted Yahoo Scout to have personality, to make it fun and engaging for users to interact with and allow all consumers of all ages to easily use and understand.

When you first visit Yahoo Scout, you are greeted with a fun home page, with a search box, a fun slogan and an animated icon above it, making it feel friendly and warm to use. There are also suggested searches below the search box, including ways to filter those suggestions based on topics such as news, finance, sports, shopping and travel. On the left are your previous queries, so you can go back in time and pick up from where you left off.

Here is a screenshot of the home page – this one has a cowboy hat, but you can find a crystal ball, gold medal, walking cartoon brain, and much more.

Yahoo Scout’s advantage. The Yahoo Search team gave me early access to play around with Yahoo Scout and while the interface is familiar to some of its competitors, the Yahoo-only elements do stand out as unique to Yahoo.

Yahoo’s advantage over many other companies doing AI in Search is that it already has a massive user base across Yahoo Mail, News, Finance and even search. Yahoo has over 500 million user profiles, and stores data such as queries, usage, intent, and more. It also has over one billion entities in its knowledge graph, and 18 trillion consumer events and signals across all those properties. Yahoo can use this to make a more personal AI-search experience. It can also categorize queries better than most because of this data.

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

Yahoo Scout can incorporate its rich content from its properties directly into the responses, including the best of Yahoo such as Yahoo Finance widgets, detailed financial information, tables and citations. Weather results, news results and much 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,” 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.”

Sending traffic to you, the publisher. Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo, told me that Scout is very much close to heart with Yahoo’s original mission of being the trusted guide to the internet. And thus from the ground up in building Yahoo Scout, Yahoo incorporated ways to honor the relationship with the open web by driving traffic downstream, to the content creators.

Yahoo Scout responses have big and wide blue highlights over its textual responses, that when overlayed by your mouse cursor, can be clicked on to go to the source of that response. Each response also has a “featured source” that is bright and easy to see and click on. Yahoo uses tables, imagery and other methods to highlight content, plus it promotes relevant news articles and sources throughout the answers.

Jim Lanzone told me that the first iterations of AI engines did not do nearly enough to send traffic downstream, to where the content of those answers were coming from. Yahoo wanted to set an example on how to try to do this right. There isn’t enough revenue out there for every publisher to make licensing deals with AI companies and the way, historically, the relationship worked, and worked well, was to send traffic to those sources.

Here is an example of how Yahoo Scout has links to sources – hovering over that blue highlight, shows the source and you can click on it to navigate there. The purple highlight, “Read more” featured source section also aims to drive traffic downstream:

CTR expectations. I asked Yahoo, what is the expected click-through rate from Yahoo Scout to publishers. The truth is, they did not know. They hope to learn a lot when it goes public and iterate to continue to improve clicks downstream, they told me. This is its first release of Yahoo Scout and real user data should be telling.

What they expect is that query length with be longer in Yahoo Scout than Yahoo Search, ad loads will be lighter and they are all hoping there will be a much higher CTR than the industry average.

Yahoo promised me that they will build a way to let publishers see impressions and click data at some point in the future. Maybe a Yahoo Webmaster Tools without the crawling and indexing data, since that is still powered by Microsoft Bing.

Yahoo Scout in every Yahoo property. You will be able to find Yahoo Scout through all of the Yahoo properties:

• Yahoo Search will incorporate AI summaries powered by Yahoo Scout
• Yahoo News will give you key highlights from articles and even incorporate the daily digest audio summary
• Yahoo Finance will incorporate a new Analyze button also powered by Yahoo Scout
• Yahoo Mail will also summarize your emails with AI and even extract actionable items, like adding items to your calendar.

Examples of Yahoo Scout in action. Here are some examples of Yahoo Scout, it is not perfect, but for a 6 month project, I have to say I am impressed.

I asked Yahoo Scout with some help on how SEO works and it gave a nice response (of course, SEO is complex and not everyone would agree with this response). There are citations throughout the summary:

I asked it to give me some sources of sites to use to find content on the topic as a follow up to that query. Clearly there are many missed opportunities here to link out more, whcih I shared with Yahoo and they agreed.

I asked Yahoo Scout how can I navigate to these sources mentioned above and it did give me links at that point:

Here is a screenshot of another citation, when you hover your mouse cursor over it:

Here are some other searches I tried including:

Entertainment: As you can see, it incorporates news articles, with larger graphics in very clickable card formats.

Finance: For finance-related queries, Yahoo brings in Yahoo Finance. I was not able 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 Jets fan all my life, I wanted to know if the Jets will have any chance at winning the Super Bowl in the next 10 years – I guess not likely. But I am happy to see that chart embedded in the answer:

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

Ads and commissions. Yahoo Scout will have ads at the bottom of some of the responses. Plus, the commerce-related queries will be monetized through affiliate commissions, which is a common revenue method across the web.

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 is such an exciting time for search these days and to see Yahoo enter the space, especially for someone like me who has been in search for over 20 years, it is just so nice to see.

Seeing industry legends, such as Jim Lanzone, Eric Feng and Brian Provost take up search with AI is making search fun again and I very much look forward to seeing what else Yahoo has up its sleeves.

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.

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