Yahoo recently announced new tools within Yahoo Scout, the company’s AI search engine, now in beta, that will support publishers and the open web.
It offers a stark contrast to the more closed ecosystem approach of Google and other AI search products.
Why does this matter? Artificial intelligence has had a devastating impact on publisher traffic as AI companies scrape, train, and repurpose publishers’ stories, typically without permission or payment. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
New research from Chartbeat published this week shows that small publishers lost 60 percent of their search traffic between Dec. 2024 to Dec. 2025. Medium publishers lost 47 percent, and large publishers 22 percent.
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