AI search, agents and discovery · Episode 102 · Season 5 · ·
The Findable Story
Dan Reeves, Co-Founder of Subjct, on why great content now has to be built to be found, and why the human storyteller still sits at the centre of an AI search world.
Dan Reeves, Co-Founder, Subjct. In conversation with Justin Cooke.
The Findable Story
0:0032:00More than two decades across publishing, journalism and content marketing, from selling advertising space at Centaur to co-founding an AI content platform. Reeves argues that great storytelling remains the job, but that in an AI search world content only counts if it can be found and trusted.
Reeves left university looking for a permanent role and started at the B2B publisher Centaur selling advertising space, his first entry into magazine media. He moved to EMAP in the mid-1990s, working commercially alongside the editorial teams on Q, Arena and The Face during what he calls the halcyon days of magazines, when music titles behaved like an extension of the record labels and drove cultural narratives. He later launched his first company with his business partner Ben, built on the premise of helping brands become publishers by taking editorial skills, content and networks to a suite of clients. That agency incubated a natural language processing product, Loyal AI, focused on richer archive search for publishers and funded through Google Digital News Initiative and innovate grants. Stripping everything back, Reeves and Ben then launched Subjct to serve sharp pain points around content optimisation and discovery.
In this conversation with host Justin, Reeves argues that search has moved from Google's deterministic crawl, rank and index monopoly to a probabilistic system of retrieval, synthesis and citation, and that this has reshaped both how content is discovered and how it must be produced. He believes brands had to learn to publish like publishers to earn a savvy audience, that AI can augment human work but never replace the storyteller who makes it sing, and that the whole system depends on an ecosystem of trustworthy content, ideally with publishers remunerated for what they create. He warns against AI slop, backs human-first optimisation over machine-generated volume, and insists niche communities and first-party relationships are how publishers survive and thrive. Great stories, he says, will always find a home.
Why is the shift in search so important, and what do these AI systems need?
“So it's hugely important for these machines to ensure that there is a ecosystem of trustworthy content.”
Where Google owned the deterministic crawl, rank and index monopoly, that has shifted at great speed in the last eighteen months. These machines use query fan-outs, passage-level extraction and synthesis, but they have to bring back content that answers a question and intent with truth, authority and trust. So it is hugely important for these machines to ensure there is an ecosystem of trustworthy content. I really hope we see a transactional agreement so publishers and creators are remunerated for the content they produce.
How can AI help journalists, creators and marketers without replacing creativity?
“It's the human interaction, it's the human element that really makes that then sing.”
AI slop is the risk. I genuinely believe in great storytelling, and that comes from a human. AI can assist, but it is the human interaction, the human element, that makes it sing. I have a photographer friend, now at an agency called Enmatic, who shoots live footage and then augments it with AI. The human is absolutely at the core, and it is expanded using AI.
You co-founded Loyal AI. Was optimisation the problem you were trying to solve?
“It's great that you can produce content, but it needs to be found and discovered.”
We incubated Loyal around natural language processing for richer archive search, funded through Google Digital News Initiative and innovate grants rather than equity. What we learnt brought us to Subjct. We stripped everything back because we could identify sharp pain points around content optimisation. It is great that you can produce content, but it needs to be found and discovered, and publishers were struggling to scale the optimisation needed to be found in both classic and AI search, as search moved from deterministic to probabilistic.
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“The arbitrage ad, ad models are disappearing.”
For publishers the key is driving the first-party relationship, building recurring revenue and subscriptions to replace revenue lost from copy sales. With traffic decline, the arbitrage ad models are disappearing, but new models are emerging and publishers are very resilient. They have an amazing relationship with their readers, viewers and listeners, so monetising that relationship is how publishers survive and thrive.
Looking forward, how will content creation change?
“I wouldn't want to go ahead any more than a year, if I'm honest.”
I would not want to go ahead any more than a year, it is moving so fast, and the last 12 months have been a watershed moment. But there is an innate sense of what people want to interact with, and that will drive it. How it is delivered and consumed will change, but it is about great stories and the human condition.
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