Weekly Roundup 26 October – 1 November 2026: China’s Search-API Price War, Alice AI Answers 44% of Yandex Queries and Naver Makes Room for More Ads

Key non-Google search stories from 26 October to 1 November 2026: Baidu’s search API price cut and DeepSeek’s billing switch-on, Brave’s pay-per-search agents, Sogou’s AI homepage, Alice AI at 44% of Yandex queries, Yandex’s indexing hangover, Naver’s ad tests and AI Briefing, and the CMA choice-screen fight. ...

Brave bx402: Pay-Per-Search for AI Agents at $0.005 a Query in Stablecoins, No API Key, and Now Its Own Payment Facilitator

Naver Tests Up to Nine Place Ads in Mobile Search From 5 November, Plus Bigger Favicons and Two-Line Site Names on Powerlink

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Chinese Advertisers Spent More Than ₽10bn on Yandex in Nine Months: 2.4x Last Year, Ecommerce Up Ninefold, Travel 7.6x

Yandex Q3 2026: Alice AI Now Answers 44% of Search Queries, and Yandex Withdraws 2026 Guidance After the Data-Centre Attacks

Naver Ads Before N Ads: New Terms From 4 November, a Third Mobile Shopping Collection Test and Liquor Ad Warnings From 9 November

Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and 360 Sign Beijing Marketing Pact: AI Labels, No Fake Endorsements, Cited Sources Must Be Named

Yandex Indexing Logs: New Pages Ignored, Old Pages Recrawled 91 Times and IndexNow 200s With No Visit Since the Outage

DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Yahoo Tell the CMA Play Store Downloads Are the Wrong Way to Pick Google Choice Screen Winners

Baidu’s Search API Still Costs ¥36 per 1,000 Calls — the Priciest Option in China’s Agent-Search Price War

Cohere Says Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Tried to Upload a File to a Beijing Bucket After Saying It Wouldn’t Use Tools

China’s AI Export Registration: DeepSeek and MiniMax Cleared, and MOFCOM Says API, App and SaaS Access Isn’t a Technology Export

Yandex Says Its Supercomputers Survived the Data-Centre Attacks and Are Being Moved — While Webmaster Still Won’t Take New Sites or Sitemaps

Naver Puts AI Briefing on the CSAT and Earnings Calls — and Starts Paying Clip Creators for AI Citations From 1 November

Sogou Strips Its Homepage to a Search Box and an AI Mode Powered by Yuanbao — While Sogou Wenwen Shuts Down on 7 November