Yahoo, the internet’s ‘OG’, wants to win over Gen Z

Yahoo wants to convince a new generation of users that one of the internet’s oldest services can be one of the new AI winners, with the Apollo-backed company seeking to develop its brand alongside the launch of an in-house AI tool and consumer products.

Chief executive Jim Lanzone told the FT that the company’s heritage gave it credibility with younger users not alive when it launched in 1994 in a “vintage way”. He described Yahoo as the internet’s “OG” — a slang term meaning “original gangster”.
He argued that familiarity has become an advantage as trust in some newer technology groups has eroded. “There’s something inherently trustworthy about [being] the ‘OG’ of the space,” he added. “We are the original guide to the internet . . . We want to get the brand back out there again.”

Lanzone, who joined Yahoo from Tinder in 2021 shortly after Apollo acquired the company from Verizon, has sought to recast the internet pioneer as a leaner consumer technology group focused on its biggest brands.

The push comes as Yahoo seeks to prove it can carve out a role in the AI era despite having spent years overshadowed by larger rivals. While the company still reaches hundreds of millions of users through products including Finance, Sports, News and email services, it remains a challenger in search and other core internet services dominated by Google and more AI-native competitors.

Yahoo plans to fully roll out an AI-powered “answer engine” called Scout later this year alongside several editorial and consumer products, part of a broader effort to return the business to growth.

At its peak as a listed company, Yahoo reached a market capitalisation of more than $125bn in January 2000. After a steady decline and subsequent buyouts, Apollo Global Management acquired Yahoo and AOL for about $5bn in 2021. It sold AOL, another dotcom survivor, to Bending Spoons for $1.5bn this year.

Wall Street bankers have viewed Yahoo as a potential candidate for an initial public offering or sale as early as next year. Lanzone declined to comment on any future transaction but said: “To be an attractive company for any investor or acquirer, you just have to be a growth company again, and that’s what we’ve been focused on.”

Lanzone declined to disclose financial details but said the business was “very healthy”, arguing that Yahoo’s established audience and decades of proprietary search, content and user data would help differentiate its AI products from rivals built primarily on models trained using the open web.

The company has chosen not to license its content to train AI models made by rival tech groups, with Lanzone arguing that many of the deals struck between publishers and AI companies are unlikely to prove a durable business model.

Instead, Scout will draw on information from the open web alongside Yahoo’s own archive of content, user data and three decades of search history. Scout uses technology licensed from a range of AI groups.

“We actually didn’t build it by inhaling the internet and creating our answers that way,” said Lanzone. “We have all of our data from the content side, the user side, and 30 years of search history [so] we should have a really interesting set of ingredients for our chefs to prepare great answers.”

Yahoo plans to fund the AI-based answers through advertising, betting that marketers will follow users from conventional search into AI-powered results. “What we really need in this category is for search advertising to cross the chasm to AI answers,” Lanzone said.

Alongside Scout, Yahoo has been expanding its subscription and consumer offerings. Earlier this year, it launched AlphaSpace, an investment platform combining market data, news and analysis for retail investors, and has since added real-time options data.

“We have some surprises up our sleeves that people would be surprised would come from Yahoo,” said Lanzone. “Once you’ve been through the turnaround period, and I think we’re through that now, you get to the fun part, which is we get to innovate on top of the base that we’ve built.”