Taboola Launches Realize+ Agentic AI System, Opens Platform to Claude Skills

Performance marketing platform Taboola announced the launch of Realize+ on April 23, 2026, positioning the system as an agentic AI solution designed to automate campaign decisions beyond search and social channels. The company simultaneously opened its platform to Claude Skills, creating a conversational interface that allows advertisers and agencies to manage campaigns directly from within Claude.

According to the official press release, Realize+ represents the next phase of Taboola's existing Realize platform. The system continuously makes and executes campaign decisions with the stated goal of driving incremental results while reducing manual effort. Taboola's documentation outlines the architecture as a two-part approach: the Decision Engine and the Element Generator.

The Decision Engine includes a Budget Allocator tool that automatically moves budget in real time to the highest-performing campaigns and opportunities. The Element Generator creates and continuously improves ads and targeting, keeping campaigns effective without manual updates. Together, these components are designed to replicate the performance and autonomy of walled gardens while providing direct access to premium inventory.

This is where the physical reality of the workflow changes. Instead of logging into a dashboard, clicking through multiple tabs, and manually adjusting bids or creative assets, marketers can now initiate campaign setup and optimization through natural language commands inside Claude. The initial skill released handles campaign setup and optimization, though Taboola plans to release additional skills over the coming months. The friction of switching between platforms disappears (a problem that has plagued users for years, frankly).

Branding in Asia reported on the launch, noting that Realize+ spent several months in beta before the official announcement. A second phase of the beta is set to expand in Q2 2026 with improved models, with further development planned across the remainder of the year. The outlet's coverage confirms the timeline and scope of the changes.

Taboola cites internal estimates indicating that around 80% of marketers would increase open web investment if automated, AI-powered campaign solutions were available. Additionally, nearly 86% say they would allocate up to a quarter of their performance budgets to the open web under those conditions. The survey data comes from 200 senior marketers at U.S. and UK enterprises with 1,000+ employees in 2026.

Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola, framed the launch as a response to scaling limitations advertisers face beyond search and social. "For years, advertisers have hit a ceiling when trying to scale performance beyond search and social," Singolda said. "With Realize+, we're removing that barrier – bringing automation, intelligence, and true performance to the open web so marketers can drive measurable growth at scale."

Singolda emphasized the shift from manual optimization to fully agentic systems. "We're entering an era where advertising is shifting from manual optimisation to fully agentic systems. With Realize+, we're building intelligent agents that operate continuously on behalf of advertisers – evaluating strategies across thousands of signals, learning from patterns across the entire ecosystem, and making decisions in real time."

He also addressed transparency concerns that have plagued walled garden systems. "What's powerful about Realize+ is that we're doing this while maintaining transparency and control, which is something that's been largely missing in walled garden systems. Advertisers don't just get outcomes, they understand and guide how those outcomes are achieved."

Early adopters have weighed in on the potential impact. Héctor Vargas Mendoza, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Sonova Marketing GmbH, noted that "allocating budget across campaigns in real time is one of the biggest challenges in performance marketing." He added that tools like Realize+ and its Budget Allocator are compelling because they can automatically shift spend toward what's working best without constant manual adjustments.

Matt Linder, Co-founder at Strand Marketing, echoed the sentiment. "Driving consistent performance at scale requires both efficiency and adaptability," Linder said. "We've been encouraged by the early results we're seeing with Realize, particularly its ability to help optimise campaigns in real time and surface new opportunities for growth."

The platform leverages Taboola's existing supply chain, reaching approximately 600 million daily active users across publishers like NBC News and Yahoo, plus OEMs such as Samsung and Xiaomi. This infrastructure enables Realize to offer unique data, specialized algorithms, and scale that independent publishers cannot match alone.

For the APAC region specifically, Taboola has been positioning itself as a "Third Alternative" on the Open Web. Company leadership in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan have been working to transform the Open Web from a traffic-driven ecosystem into a performance-driven growth engine. The Realize+ launch extends this strategy globally while maintaining regional customization.

Whether the automation actually delivers on its promises remains to be seen. The technology sounds impressive on paper, but the real test comes when advertisers compare Realize+ performance against their existing walled garden investments. Whether users actually pay for it remains the real question.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn