Yahoo has introduced Yahoo Scout, a proprietary AI-powered answer engine that the company says is now available in beta for U.S. users across Yahoo Search and the broader Yahoo product portfolio. Yahoo said Scout is being rolled out on desktop and mobile, positioning the product for a wide consumer footprint across Mail, News, Finance, Sports, and other Yahoo services.
The company is framing Scout as a response to the shift in search behavior from keyword queries and link lists to natural language prompts and direct answers. Yahoo said Scout synthesizes information from the open web alongside Yahoo-owned data and Yahoo content, then presents responses in a format designed to be easier to review and act on, including rich media and structured elements such as lists and tables, plus source transparency.
Yahoo is emphasizing the scale of its underlying data as a key differentiator. The company said Scout is informed by decades of user insights and search history, and pointed to a foundation that includes hundreds of millions of user profiles, a knowledge graph spanning more than a billion entities, and trillions of consumer events annually across Yahoo properties. Yahoo’s goal is to use those signals to deliver answers and suggested actions that become increasingly personalized over time.
Alongside the launch of the answer engine, Yahoo announced the Yahoo Scout Intelligence Platform, which it described as a layer of AI capabilities embedded across core vertical products. Yahoo highlighted existing and expanding features, including AI summaries in Yahoo Mail, Key Takeaways in Yahoo News, and game-oriented intelligence experiences in Yahoo Sports. The company also outlined additional experiences that tie Scout directly into shopping and investing workflows, including faster product comparison research for consumers and one-click analysis features within Yahoo Finance that refresh frequently and synthesize signals from news, ratings, financials, and earnings content.
Yahoo also disclosed new AI partnerships connected to Scout. The company said it has partnered with Anthropic to use Claude as Scout’s primary foundational AI model, citing performance and safety attributes as important requirements for a consumer answer engine. Yahoo added that Scout leverages Microsoft Bing’s Grounding API and is also joining Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace pilot, which it described as aligned with goals to connect publisher work to new audiences and support revenue opportunities.
Yahoo said Scout will continue to expand in the months ahead, with plans to deepen personalization, introduce additional capabilities across key verticals, and develop new search-advertising formats suited to generative AI experiences. The company said the Scout answer engine is available today in beta for U.S. users through Yahoo’s Scout experience and within the Yahoo Search app on iOS and Android.
KEY QUOTES
“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.”
Jim Lanzone, CEO, Yahoo
“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.”
Eric Feng, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo Research Group
“Yahoo Scout now powers a new generation of intelligence experiences across Yahoo, seamlessly integrated into the products people use every day.”
Eric Feng, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Yahoo Research Group
“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,”
Ami Vora, Head of Product, Anthropic
