Arc XP Washington Post Company

AI already answers your readers' questions. Shouldn't it use your journalism?

Ask the News is a publisher-owned AI answer and reader-intent layer that answers reader questions with your trusted journalism – and captures the first-party intent behind every one. Works with any CMS.

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Reader discovery has changed. The revenue model is changing with it 

New industry research puts a specific number on a trend publishers are already feeling: only 4% of people who use AI chatbots for news click through to the original source — compared to 19% from search. That's not a traffic dip. That's reader intent, audience data, and subscription revenue migrating off your properties to platforms that don't share any of it.

 

And it's accelerating. AI chatbot use for news grew 43% in a single year — and it's running fastest among the audience publishers care most about: 16% of under-35s now use AI for news.

*Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026

The next era of discovery belongs to publishers who own the answer experience, before readers learn to find those answers somewhere else.

 

Three steps. No new editorial workflows

1. Capture reader intent. Turn every article and page into an intent-capture surface with suggested questions and follow-ups – automatically generated from your content.
2. Answer with journalism. Deliver trusted, cited answers grounded exclusively in your owned reporting, and guide readers deeper into relevant coverage.
3. Turn intent into publisher value. Use intent signals to support engagement, subscriptions, monetization, and editorial strategy.
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Wherever readers are curious, Ask the News belongs

• Reader-facing Q&A: Branded question-and-answer experiences across article pages, section fronts, homepages, and apps.
• Archive activation: Turn years of reporting into a searchable, AI-powered experience that drives rediscovery and deeper engagement.
• Editorial intelligence: Capture reader questions and intent signals that inform editorial strategy, audience development, and content planning.
• Subscription & audience engagement: Keep audiences exploring your journalism within your ecosystem instead of leaving for third-party AI tools.
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Built for publishers who can't afford to get it wrong

• Built in a real newsroom environment: Developed with the standards, constraints, traffic patterns, and editorial guardrails that newsrooms require, not a generic AI widget adapted for media.
• A governed reader-intent layer: Not just an answer widget, but a publisher-owned layer connecting audience insight, engagement, and monetization.
• You own the intent and the revenue: Reader curiosity becomes first-party publisher data, not signal captured by search engines, AI platforms, or ad networks.
• Built to drive publisher outcomes: Supports engagement, archive discovery, subscriptions, advertising, and editorial intelligence.

The number that matters most

4 out of 5 Ask the News users are highly engaged, paying subscribers.

 

That's the result from a real newsroom environment — The Washington Post — with real editorial standards and real reader expectations. It reflects something research consistently confirms: readers who get to ask questions go deeper, stay longer, and convert at higher rates. Ask the News captures that moment on your properties, not someone else's.

 

  • Confidence-based refusal to avoid unsupported answers
  • Query blocking rules and moderation controls
  • Wire-content rejection and source filtering
  • Per-site and per-organization governance settings
  • Source citations attached to every answer

 

Pricing

Pick from three flat-fee tiers with predictable overages. Cached queries and unanswered queries cost nothing, and you'll get a content backfill during onboarding.

AI-powered discovery is already where your readers are going. The question is whether they find your journalism — or someone else's.