Founded as a Sunday paper in 2005, ProtoThema is now Greece’s largest online publisher, drawing 1.5 million unique daily visitors in a country of 10 million. They’ve thrived by constantly adapting to industry shifts, like the transition to digital media and rise of social video. Now, they’re working with the Google News Initiative and FT Strategies to pioneer the responsible use of AI in online news. Spearheading this initiative is Cloudevo, a homegrown tech spin-off founded by ProtoThema’s digital leadership. “ProtoThema is very tech-forward,” explains Senior Manager Aliya Itzkowitz of FT Strategies. “They’re never afraid to try new technologies and embrace them faster than many other legacy publishers.”

Spawning multiple innovations from 2024 onwards, the partnership aims to adapt ProtoThema’s various websites to address news fatigue while meeting readers’ expectations for seamless digital experiences. Another goal is to help the publication’s 300 journalists spend less time on manual administrative tasks and more time on their craft. To achieve this, the ProtoThema team incorporated Gemini and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform into their existing tech stack. “From day one, Google told us, ‘We have your back,’” says Chief Digital Officer Nikos Iliopoulos. Reflecting on this collaborative effort, Camila Samilian, News Partnerships Manager for Southern Europe at Google, notes, “It’s fantastic to see ProtoThema take such an innovative and forward-looking approach to testing new technologies and reimagining the news experience.”

Early in the partnership, the team scored a major win by automating their comment moderation process. Using a custom Greek-language algorithm developed with Gemini, they avoided time-consuming manual reviews, scaled from 30,000 to 320,000 comments per month, and reduced time to publish from several hours to 90 seconds. Next, they launched an English news edition to expand their international reach. A streamlined content pipeline translates trending articles and inserts them into ProtoThema’s publishing platform. Human editors verify them for accuracy, freeing up journalists to spend more time reporting and writing.

The team then overhauled the English edition’s search functionality, which readers previously found frustrating. “With our old system, if you misspelled something, there were no results,” Iliopoulos says. To fix this, they built a semantic search tool that lets readers ask questions in conversational language. All answers are based entirely on ProtoThema’s reporting to maintain journalistic credibility. The new experience drove a 20-percent increase in search traffic, making the search portal one of the English site’s top three most-visited pages. The team is now applying this same innovation to their Greek edition.

ProtoThema and their partners didn’t stop there. To boost engagement, they added article recommendations at the bottom of every story. “By combining Gemini with real-time data, we can predict which articles will be in the top 10 and then recommend them,” Iliopoulos explains. Article views and engagement time both increased by 10 percent, while user sessions grew by 20 percent. To cater to fast-moving, mobile-first readers, they also added an “AI Takeaways” section to every article. Acting as a teaser, these highly scannable summaries have lowered ProtoThema’s bounce rate from 60 to 47 percent. “A user can read it and say, ‘Hey, it’s worth going deeper,’” explains Chief Technology Officer George Koiliaris.

Looking back on these innovations, Iliopoulos advises other publishers to overcome initial skepticism about AI, which can be deep-seated in the industry. “Our team was hesitant, but now they’re thrilled because they don’t have to do things that were a waste of time,” he says. “What we’re doing with the Google News Initiative is securing the future of ProtoThema. They’re helping us prepare for what the news industry will look like in the years to come.”