Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on turning around a 30-year-old internet brand and launching AI search product Scout

Summary

Jim Lanzone became Yahoo CEO in early 2020 with a single thesis about turnarounds: start with existing traffic, rebuild products and teams, then focus. His background is entirely turnarounds. He joined Ask Jeeves as head of product when the stock was near delisting, became CEO, and grew it 50x before IAC acquired it. He then built CBS All Access five years before Disney+ and HBO Max launched. Most recently he ran Tinder under IAC ownership. Yahoo was the "white whale" he'd wanted to work on since 2010.

Yahoo's original strategic mistake was outsourcing search to Google in 2000. Yahoo gave Google a logo on every search results page to secure a better rate during the post-crash era. The move made financial sense at the time and Yahoo was right to prioritize user experience, but it cost them the highest-leverage asset in search. That mistake cascaded. Subsequent teams tried to compete in social and video, made 40 ad-tech acquisitions that were later divested, and spent four to five years inside Verizon post-2016 without clear strategic alignment.

Lanzone inherited 250 million US users and 700 million globally, with 75% of traffic coming direct rather than paid acquisition. Yahoo still ranks top-five in finance, sports, news, and email monthly. Mail drives recurring daily usage and is described as the "spine of the book."

Lanzone divested ad-tech acquisitions to narrow focus back to core consumer products. He kept the demand-side platform because Yahoo's first-party data advantage—18 trillion user events per year, over 500 million user profiles, one billion tracked entities—allows it to target both on-property and off-property. Every product has been relaunched in the past 18 months. Weather, finance, sports, and news now produce 60 hours of programming weekly each. Yahoo acquired Artifacts, the AI-powered news startup founded by Kevin Rose and Mike Krieger, about 18 months ago. Rather than absorb it into the main product, Yahoo made it the engine for the Yahoo News app while keeping its identity.

Yahoo launched Scout this week, an AI answer engine powered by Claude from Anthropic for responses and Bing for web grounding. It is available at scout.yahoo.com and scout.com for US users in beta. The product is designed to look and feel like search, not a chatbot. All answers include blue-linked citations routing traffic back to original sources, a deliberate break from early AI search products that cited content without driving clicks downstream. Lanzone describes this as taking care of the open web and potentially setting a pattern for how others should think about publisher relationships.

Lanzone says Yahoo approached AI search after realizing it had assets to bring to the table: traffic, distribution, and proprietary data. He bought Symbol, a company run by Eric Fang over the summer, and put Fang in charge of all search. Fang's team built Scout. On why not just leverage Bing, Lanzone argues that Yahoo's proprietary vertical data from finance, sports, news, and other categories, combined with traffic and distribution ability, creates a differentiated offering that a pure Bing partnership could not unlock. Bing has been indexed web search only since 2009.

Yahoo touches 90% of the US internet. Half the user base is millennial or Gen Z, which Lanzone notes surprises many. The company barely invested in brand for 23 years until last year's 15-second Bill Murray Super Bowl spot. Yahoo games launched with Candy Crush yesterday. Partnerships with MrBeast on fantasy games and Liquid Death on another fantasy game are part of a strategy to rebuild brand perception as creative and looser than expected.

Yahoo still hosts ancient codebases inherited through decades of ownership changes. The company was not on cloud infrastructure when Lanzone arrived and is mid-migration across every division. A Verizon-era exclusive sports-betting deal with BetMGM runs through end of quarter. Yahoo made a short-term deal with Polymarket to test adjacent markets while locked out.

Lanzone has delegated AI tool adoption to heads of state rather than mandating from the top. His CTO, HR, and engineering leads are using it. Adoption is "pretty top heavy" according to Lanzone: some people use it heavily, others are reluctant. The goal is not headcount reduction but getting more done with the same team. Given the legacy codebases and ongoing cloud migrations, AI tools for documentation, replatforming, and small code changes are theoretically high-leverage but operationally complex.

Lanzone frames turnarounds as mathematically easier than building from zero. Growing a multibillion-dollar company by 25 to 50 percent creates more enterprise value than scaling from zero to billions. Ask Jeeves rose 50x. CBS was $3 a share after the financial crisis and got back to $70. If executed correctly at Yahoo, Lanzone sees a path to IPO or sale. The mission is growth: grow the user base, grow the products.

The underlying bet is that by rebuilding products level by level, proving solid business footing, and then innovating—as happened with CBS All Access in 2014 or Ask Jeeves' shift to structured data 20 years ago—Yahoo earns the right to launch new things like Scout. Yahoo is a vintage brand, not vintage technology. Lanzone is sensitive to that distinction. The gong button he brought to the studio was a callback to the brand's original identity, a nod to the nostalgia play without claiming Yahoo is anything other than what it is: a large, resilient installed base in need of thoughtful product work.