Future is betting on AI to boost recirculation – and make that stickier audience more appealing to advertisers.
The publisher’s new proprietary AI-powered content categorization engine, called Advisor, acts like a “brain” trained on Future’s internal data, according to Jamie Samuel, head of commercial products at Future. Built into its audience data platform Aperture, Advisor lets Future quickly test an “unlimited” number of approaches to keep users engaged on its sites, ranging from chatbots to content recommendation widgets, he said.
Advisor uses machine learning and OpenAI’s large language models to analyze articles in real-time across Future’s over 50 publications, including Marie Claire, Who What Wear, Tom’s Guide and The Week.
Previously, Future’s content categorization system analyzed pages as a whole. Now, the Advisor engine parses individual paragraphs, images and even price points mentioned within each article, Samuel said. Future’s data science, engineering and product teams can then query Advisor’s database to uncover audience insights data and build products tailored to user journeys, Samuel added.
Future took a measured approach to rolling out its AI-powered content recommendation engine, quietly introducing it in beta over the last six months across an increased number of sites.
But the first test for Advisor was in 2023. Future wanted to trial the user insights coming from Advisor’s content categorization, and see if they could be the foundation of an AI product that wouldn’t hallucinate. The first use case was a chatbot for Tom’s Guide called Hammerbot, which went live in beta in 2023. Another chatbot – a shopping assistant chatbot for Who What Wear – debuted last October.
Advisor has now evolved from a limited experiment into a core pillar of Future’s recirculation strategy. The AI-powered tool also replaced the search functionality on all of Future’s sites in its CMS last September.
Advisor has led to a three-fold increase in onsite click-through rates, according to Samuel. This has also led to a “notable” increase in revenue per session, Samuel added. He declined to share how much of an increase, but said users staying on Future’s sites for longer and reading more content gives the publisher more opportunities to serve them ads or purchase products.
Advisor analyzes each page to recommend relevant articles, products or deals – like surfacing top games for a new console or wall mounts for a TV. And it can change its recommendations around current events, such as Amazon Pride Day sales events.
The engine powers four main widgets on Future’s sites, Samuel said. The publisher will continue to use third-party content recommendation widgets on some of its sites from its deal with Taboola. But the development of its own proprietary version signals a move toward in-house solutions, and the change means Future has gained more “control and precision” over its onsite content recommendations, Samuel said.
“Every single page we’ve got is an additional opportunity to serve someone [readers] something [they’re] interested in. And [Advisor] is definitely doing it through a kind of experimentation framework. It’s not doing it on its own,” Samuel said. “As we run those experiments, we learn what works… We’re just trying to complete the [user] journey, and as they complete that journey, we see the revenue per session go up.”
Aperture has a content tagging system, but its taxonomy – on things like newly released games, or fashion brands at specific price points – needs constant upkeep, Samuel said. Advisor helps keep that taxonomy current.
Now that Future has proven it works to engage its readers, it’s pitching Advisor to advertisers as a way to optimize campaign targeting. (Future’s digital advertising revenue from September 2024 to March 2025 was down 8% year over year, according to the company’s latest earnings report.)
AI technology can help update audience segments at scale, with more ease and granularity. That gives advertisers and publishers richer data tied to audience attributes – helping surface a full user lifecycle that wasn’t previously possible at scale, said Katie Kelly, evp of commerce experience at ad agency Horizon Commerce.
“The fact that that’s catching on – on the publisher side and with media partners – is great news, because it’s further connecting those dots. I think it’s really exciting that that’s something [Future has] baked into the product they’re pushing,” she said.
Plugging Advisor into Aperture reduces the manual work, though Samuel stressed that wouldn’t affect jobs. “It’s totally not about reducing human impact. It’s more just benefiting the systems and adding to it. So it’s already been in the background to improve the accuracy and scale, and we’ve been testing out our segment performance,” he said.
Advisor helps Future build a more engaged user base that advertisers can target, Samuel said. “The segment itself is accurate and expanded and engaged.” Ten advertisers have tested Advisor, he noted. He declined to name the brands.
There is often a “disconnect” between paid media and a user’s digital experience, Kelly said. The focus is often on getting a user in front of an ad, but less focus on the “middle layer” on what the user is doing before and after seeing that ad on a site, she said.
Connecting these dots is “not all that sexy,” Kelly said. But it’s “really valuable” for an advertiser to target an audience that’s more primed for their ad, or for that user to have an onsite experience that’s more relevant to them taking an action after seeing that ad, she noted.
“With the advent of these types of tools, maybe you can’t control [the environment], but at least you’re getting the visibility into what are the means by which these publishers are helping better facilitate that individual’s experience,” Kelly said.
