Advertising technology firm Ad.com Interactive Media has acquired values-based marketing firm Public Good as part of a broader development of a new search engine that taps into the trend of using conversational artificial intelligence tools to look for things online.

As part of the acquisition, Public Good co-Founder and President Melissa Anderson will lead the development of the new search engine, called Search.com. In an interview with The Desk last week, Anderson said there was a tremendous opportunity to “flip the script” on the various ways brands and publishers can reach online users who are growing accustom to using AI chatbots and similar tools to look for things across the Internet.

While some off-the-shelf AI tools are charging customers to perform more than a few queries, Search.com will allow users to perform an unlimited number of searches, Anderson said. The platform will compete against larger search engines backed by major tech platforms by incentivizing the use of Search.com through cash back rewards and other perks when people buy goods and services from advertising partners.

“Rather than charging people and publishers, our model provides value back,” Anderson said.

On the publishing side, Search.com wants to help news outlets, review websites and other information publishers further monetize their content by feeding it into the Search.com platform and by offering white-label custom search solutions that work within their websites. Both avenues offer revenue-generating opportunities through the placement of ads, Anderson said.

“Typically, publishers pay a provider for the search capability on their site; again, we’re flipping the script by providing custom search capabilities on publisher sites at no cost,” Anderson affirmed. “In addition, we’re monetizing the searches by serving contextual brand advertisements, and the publishers receive a 60 percent revenue share.”

Key Points — Search.com:

• Searchers are given an unlimited opportunity to look for things online or perform other tasks like summarizing text or analyzing data, just as they would on other platforms. When searchers purchase things from advertising partners, they earn cash back rewards; accelerated cash back opportunities are available through a premium membership service.
• Advertisers gain visibility through a conversational, AI-powered search engine at a time when marketing budgets are shifting away from online display and social media advertising with an eye toward AI-driven platforms.
• Publishers are able to monetize their content by integrating free, ad-based search solutions into their websites and feeding their content into Search.com’s platform; when answers are returned using content from partner publishers, Search.com shares in the associated ad revenue.

The solution comes at a time when larger search engines are scraping public websites for data to train their artificial intelligence models, but providing little in the way of return value for their sources. Google, for instance, uses public websites for its “AI Overviews” product that appears at the top of search results, but the summaries contain few links back to publisher websites, and studies have shown that people rarely click on links that are visible.

Google’s approach has led to a drastic downturn in referral traffic to ad-supported news and review websites, whose business models are highly dependent on clicks from search engines. Some larger media companies like the New York Times and Condé Nast have managed to squeeze out content licensing arrangements with AI developers like OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Amazon, but smaller, independent publishers typically lack the muscle to carve out similar deals of their own.

Artificial intelligence is not going away: One in four people are now using ChatGPT as a starting point when they look for things online, according to a consumer survey released by Adobe last month. Even when searchers aren’t trying to use AI, Google — the largest search engine in the world — has changed its core search product in a way that exposes people to AI-generated summaries by default, with practically no way to avoid them.

Anderson and the team at Search.com think there are opportunities to restore balance to the ecosystem, in a way that provides value to searchers, advertisers and publishers alike. Rather than suppressing links to news and review websites, Search.com makes them more visible. Even if a person doesn’t click through to a website, publishers still earn money from their content because Search.com cuts them in on the revenue from advertising that is displayed within answers.

“There are a lot of LLMs out there that are scraping content and not providing attribution, and that’s bad for journalism,” Anderson said. “That’s one of the things that we’re passionate about, the attribution and revenue generation for the publisher in exchange for the content.”

Background: Public Good & Ad.com

• Public Good drives awareness around a brand’s values and efforts to promote social good; the company has worked with a number of household names, including outdoor recreation retailer REI, cosmetics firm L’Oreal and General Motors.
• Ad.com has offered advertising technology solutions since its founding in 1998. The company uses a mixture of innovative ad formats, intelligence targeting and historical data to provide a variety of solutions across search, social, mobile, video and the general web.
• Ad.com acquired Public Good earlier this year with the goal of integrating Public Good’s technology and mission into Search.com, a new conversational AI search engine that furthers Ad.com’s mission to help advertisers navigate the evolving marketing landscape while incentivizing searchers and helping publishers monetize their content.

Search.com might be a new product, but parent company Ad.com has been navigating through the complicated evolution of online advertising for more than three decades. When changes occur, Ad.com is able to guide advertisers by using its time-tested, full-funnel ecosystem and historical data to plot the best course of action for long-term results.

Danny Bibi, the CEO of Ad.com, said the company already process more than 30 billion search requests — not including Search.com — and sees more than 1.4 billion bid requests each day. When evaluated against comparable ad tech solutions offered by competitors like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, Ad.com provides more-effective pricing through a cost-per-click (CPC) model and better return on advertising spend (ROAS), Bibi said.

“The ecosystem of users that we serve is full funnel — we can give users the information they need at a faster pace, leveraging our machine learning and AI technology,” Bibi affirmed. “At the same time, [we] respect users privacy while providing them with quality information free of charge.”

The new Search.com platform is available to use by clicking or tapping here. Ad.com intends to release more information about Search.com later this week.