Taboola CEO and co-founder Adam Singolda said at Citi's 2026 Global TMT Conference on September 8, 2026, that the company's AI initiatives are strengthening its growth case. Taboola generates about $2 billion in annual revenue and has more than 2,000 scaled advertisers, defined as customers spending more than $100,000 a year. Ex-traffic acquisition cost margins run in the 35% to 40% range, EBITDA margins are around 30%, and free cash flow conversion is about 60% to 70% of EBITDA. The company's free cash flow yield is 19%, while InvestingPro data cited in the transcript showed a market capitalization of $1.03 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 9.64.
Singolda highlighted DeeperDive, launched in September 2025 with USA Today as the first partner, as the first free large-language-model answer engine supported by advertising for the open web. USA Today sees more than 10 million questions a month through the product, and adoption rates are consistently above 10%. He said Taboola is aiming to exceed Perplexity's roughly 30 million users and wants to be second only to Gemini in LLM monetization. He also said cost-per-mille rates for ads shown inside AI conversations are 5 to 10 times higher than traditional display ads on the open web. Realize, a relaunch of Taboola's advertising platform, was introduced about 1.5 years ago, and the company's Yahoo partnership was announced about three years earlier.
The company also launched a Claude skill and MCP bridge that connects to its Realize engine, allowing users to buy ads through Claude Code without speaking directly with Taboola. Singolda described the process as opening a $20 subscription, creating a Taboola account and instructing Claude to place ads, adding that the feature is already generating millions of dollars for the company. He characterized Claude as an account manager that uses Taboola's system to execute purchases.
Singolda said agencies spend about $60 billion a year on programmatic buying, but called traditional programmatic an outdated protocol that is inefficient, unable to fully use available first-party data and likely to be deprecated. He said performance advertising tends to be more durable because it is often the last type of spending companies cut. He acknowledged that AI search is reducing referral traffic for publishers, but said Taboola's personalization and conversational tools help offset the decline.
Taboola's NBC News partnership is exclusive for monetizing all of NBC News and today.com, although NBC retains the right to sell some inventory directly. Singolda said replicating that model across about 30% of Taboola's publisher base could triple revenue. He concluded that there are never enough publishers, underscoring the company's continued push to expand its reach.
