Yahoo’s Comeback: CEO Jim Lanzone on AI, Innovation, and Reclaiming Digital Relevance

Yahoo’s Comeback: CEO Jim Lanzone on AI, Innovation, and Reclaiming Digital Relevance

As artificial intelligence reshapes the digital landscape, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone is leading a bold transformation of the iconic internet brand. From revitalizing Yahoo’s core products to redefining the future of search in the age of AI, Lanzone is focused on restoring relevance and sparking innovation across the platform. Here’s a look at how he’s steering the company through reinvention and embracing new tech to reconnect with users in 2025 and beyond.

[Photos: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]

Inside Yahoo’s Reinvention: CEO Jim Lanzone on AI, Search, and the Fight to Stay Relevant

Yahoo stands at a crucial turning point. Despite still commanding a massive audience across platforms like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo News, the brand is working hard to recapture the cultural momentum it enjoyed in its early internet days.

In a recent episode of the Rapid Response podcast, hosted by Bob Safian (former editor-in-chief of Fast Company), Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone opens up about the urgent need for reinvention, the fear of being “left behind,” and how the rise of AI-driven search engines is transforming the internet into a landscape of answer engines—with major implications for traditional media and content discovery.

Lanzone also offers valuable insights into the evolving relationship between fantasy sports and real-money gaming, as Yahoo positions itself to compete in the new frontier of digital entertainment.

This conversation is part of the Rapid Response series from the creators of Masters of Scale, where today’s top business leaders share how they navigate real-world disruption and transformation. Don’t miss out—subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts for more behind-the-scenes business insights.

Yahoo’s Modern Revival: CEO Jim Lanzone on Rebuilding with Strong Foundations

Despite its age, Yahoo remains one of the internet’s most visited platforms, with Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance consistently ranking at the top of their categories. Yahoo Fantasy Sports continues to dominate the digital playing field, its email service is the second-largest globally, and the company even maintains a substantial share in search traffic—albeit not on Google's scale. On the surface, these accomplishments might suggest a thriving enterprise, not one undergoing reinvention.

But according to CEO Jim Lanzone, the company’s evolution is less about survival and more about transformation.

“We’ve got amazing ingredients for a turnaround,” Lanzone says. “The brands are still extremely relevant, and the user loyalty is incredibly strong.”

After spinning out of Verizon, which acquired Yahoo (and AOL) in the mid-2010s for around $5 billion, Yahoo has returned to operating independently. Yet, as Lanzone points out, it competes in a digital ecosystem where many peers—Google, Apple, Meta—are now trillion-dollar entities. That gap makes reinvention not just strategic, but essential.

“Some of our core products hadn’t seen meaningful updates in over a decade,” he admits. “In just the past nine months, we’ve relaunched every product we operate with brand-new versions.”

This includes a significant Yahoo Mail overhaul and updates across its suite of services, from news to sports to finance, aiming to better serve users and appeal to advertisers with powerful first-party data.

Building Value Without Forcing Unity

While Yahoo has multiple strong verticals, from finance to fantasy sports, Lanzone isn’t forcing a unified “Yahoo-for-everything” identity like in the dot-com boom era.

“Back in the ’90s, Yahoo was a one-stop internet portal,” he notes. “But the internet has evolved. Today, people come to Yahoo for specific things, and that’s okay.”

Still, the value for advertisers lies in Yahoo’s broad reach across highly engaged, yet diverse, user groups. Whether a user is deeply invested in financial markets or casually checking fantasy football stats, Yahoo maintains a direct relationship with hundreds of millions of users, which powers its advanced ad-targeting capabilities.

A Balanced Approach to Growth

As Yahoo approaches another NFL season—one of its peak traffic periods— Lanzone hints at major updates in the pipeline for its fantasy platform. But he’s clear: Yahoo isn’t aiming to push users into using all its services under a single umbrella just yet.

“Introducing users to other Yahoo products is part of the long-term vision,” Lanzone explains. “But we’re not going top-down. We’re letting users engage naturally, where it makes sense for them.”

That user-first approach has shaped everything from Yahoo’s homepage relaunch in February to testing how people engage with updates, ensuring that longtime users don’t feel alienated by change.

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Conclusion: Yahoo’s Comeback Isn’t Just Nostalgia—It’s Strategy

With a refreshed product line, a nuanced approach to its ecosystem, and a renewed focus on AI, personalization, and advertising, Yahoo’s revival is more than just a comeback story—it’s a modern transformation rooted in strong legacy assets. And under Jim Lanzone’s leadership, the company isn’t just staying relevant—it’s redefining what relevance means in today’s internet landscape.

Yahoo’s Homepage Revival and the Search-AI Dilemma: Jim Lanzone on Merging Legacy with the Future

As part of Yahoo’s reinvention, CEO Jim Lanzone has led a return to the company’s roots—starting with its homepage. After years of functioning like a basic newsfeed, Yahoo’s main landing page is now returning to a “portal-style” design, similar to what made it iconic in the early internet era.

“We brought back utility-driven features like weather, and the response was overwhelmingly positive,” Lanzone explains. “People want a homepage that helps them get things done, not just scroll through headlines.”

Lanzone adds that the classic Yahoo homepage from 2003 or 2007, which once bundled everything—news, weather, email, stocks, sports—was likely ahead of its time. In today’s chaotic digital world full of clickbait, misinformation, and fragmented user experiences, the idea of a trusted, all-in-one platform is regaining relevance.

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AI’s Disruption of Search—and Yahoo’s Role in Shaping the Future

As generative AI reshapes search, platforms like Yahoo face complex challenges—and opportunities. While many media outlets worry about declining referral traffic from AI-powered search engines, Lanzone brings a deeper, historical perspective:

“I spent 10 years in the search industry. Even in the early 2000s, we were already shifting toward ‘answer engines’—think weather results, song lyrics, translations—right inside the search page.”

What’s different now is the scale and intelligence behind large language models (LLMs). Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are increasingly citing evergreen, educational platforms like Wikipedia and Reddit. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s strength lies in real-time content—such as stock prices, breaking news, and sports scores—which serves a different user intent than timeless informational queries.

Lanzone emphasizes that Yahoo’s long-standing mission in search isn’t about hoarding traffic, but about distributing it across the open web.

“Yahoo has always supported a healthy ecosystem by sending users to our content partners and sharing revenue. That’s part of the open-web agreement: you index content and, in return, drive traffic to its source.”

He warns that AI models that simply ingest content without fairly redistributing traffic could undermine this digital balance. Tiny citation links, he adds, aren’t enough to support publishers.

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The Future of Search: Personalized, Dynamic, and Ethical

Lanzone believes the AI-driven search experience of the future won’t be one-size-fits-all. Instead, it will deliver dynamic, personalized responses based on both the nature of the query and the individual user.

“We’re still in the early, experimental phase of AI in search,” he says. “But ultimately, the results page should adapt based on context and user behavior—while still rewarding content creators with actual traffic.”

As Yahoo continues to evolve its search business, the company aims to champion a model that upholds fairness, transparency, and utility, rather than turning search into a closed loop of AI-generated responses.

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Final Thought:
Yahoo isn’t simply reviving its past—it’s redesigning its future. By blending portal-era practicality with next-gen AI strategy, Lanzone and his team are building a Yahoo that’s relevant, responsible, and ready for the next phase of the internet.

Published: 01 Jul 2025