Weekly Roundup 19–25 October 2026: DeepSeek and Tencent Sell Search to Machines, Yandex Counts the Damage and Naver Rebuilds Its Ad Stack

Key non-Google search stories from 19–25 October 2026: DeepSeek and Tencent search APIs, the US DeepSeek removal order, one-click ad hiding in China, Yandex’s Metrika and indexing hangover, Alice AI’s reach, and Naver’s Related Questions, Place and N Ads changes. ...

DeepSeek Closes a ¥100bn ($15bn) Round Led by CATL and Tencent at a ~$74bn Valuation as a Shanghai IPO Comes Into View

Yandex Forum Recap: Fresh Pages Stuck Outside the Index for Days, Recrawl Still Blocked, IndexNow as the Workaround and More Metrika Gaps

Latest News

Bing China Joins Baidu and Sogou in Letting Users Hide Search Ads With One Click — 360 Is the Last Holdout

Naver Search Now Answers University Admissions in the SERP — Places, Competition Ratios, Converted Scores and an AI Briefing on Recommended Subjects

Naver Tests a New Restaurant Place Listing From 29 October — Badges for Reservation Surges and Revisits That Ads Can’t Buy, Plus 6,066 New Power Contents Keywords

How Asia’s Search Engines Built Their Own AI Answers: Dan Taylor’s Asia SEO Summit Talk Previewed

Weibo Rebuilds Hot Search Around Events and Viewpoints — Older Posts Without the Hashtag Can Now Surface, and an AI ‘Chief Editor’ Is in Testing

Yandex Promises a ‘Large-Scale’ Alice AI Update Within Weeks — App DAU Up 14% as It Talks Past the Data Centre Outage

Naver’s Ad Centre Becomes ‘N Ads’ on 4 November — With One-Tap AI Recommendations, a ‘Why Isn’t My Ad Showing?’ Bot and Prompt-Built Audiences

Naver Community Recap: Blog Tab Top Spots Reshuffle From Friday, Cafe Posts Drop Out of ‘Relevance’ and Websites Pile Into Integrated Search

Yandex Direct Is Fully Editable Again After Nine Days — Webmaster’s Recrawl and Removal Tools Are Still Read-Only

DeepSeek Open-Sources DeepInfer, the Engine That Serves Its Answers — Deterministic Output, Huawei Ascend Support and Some Missing Parts

Tencent Opens Yuanbao Search to Developers at ¥14 per 1,000 Calls — Built on Sogou, Priced Against DeepSeek, and Made for Agents

China Put RMB250 Billion Into AI in H1 2026, Mostly Into Robots. The US Put $217 Billion Into Two Model Labs