Mumbai: Taboola, a global leader in delivering performance at scale for advertisers, has announced new research highlighting growing advertiser adoption of AI-powered solutions and increasing interest in applying these capabilities beyond walled gardens. The new study — titled “The Agentic Advantage in Performance Marketing: Securing Incremental Growth Beyond Search and Social” — explores how advertisers are approaching performance in an increasingly AI-driven landscape.
Key Findings: AI Is Winning, But Only Within Walled Gardens
The research reveals three critical insights shaping the future of performance advertising. First, agentic AI is delivering meaningful results — with 76% of advertisers already seeing significant performance uplift from AI-powered solutions, primarily on search and social platforms. However, the benefits remain largely confined to these walled garden environments.
Second, the vast majority of performance advertisers feel constrained by this limitation. 80% of advertisers say they would immediately increase their ad spend on the open web if comparable agentic solutions existed, with 86% willing to allocate up to a quarter of their performance budget to make the shift — signalling a clear and unmet demand for AI-driven automation beyond search and social.
Third, the biggest advertisers are struggling the most. The number one challenge for advertisers adopting agentic AI is integrating it into existing workflows — but the struggle is disproportionately felt by large advertisers. Only 9% of advertisers spending $300K–$499K per month cite integration as a barrier, compared to 74% of companies spending $1M–$4.9M per month who call it the dominant roadblock.
Adam Singolda, Founder & CEO, Taboola, said, “Advertisers of all sizes are leaning into agentic advertising, and the results are following. Our research shows a clear demand for advertisers that want the same ‘always-on,’ AI-driven performance they see in walled gardens applied to the open web, however. They are looking for autonomous systems that learn continuously, pivot in real time, and turn every impression into a measurable outcome.”
In response to this growing market need, Taboola announced Realize+ in April 2026 — an agentic solution that uses its supply, first-party data, and AI to scale performance through a Decision Engine that reallocates spend in real time, and an Element Generator that automates creative and targeting. The company has now rolled out the Realize+ beta to help advertisers drive outcomes at scale across the open web.
Taboola’s platform, Realize, currently reaches approximately 600 million daily active users across some of the world’s best publishers — including NBC News, Yahoo, and OEM partners such as Samsung and Xiaomi — offering unique data, specialised algorithms, and unmatched scale for advertisers seeking performance beyond search and social.
