Yandex’s New Ambassador Role and Advanced Algorithms

In a detailed interview with SEOnews, Mikhail Slivinsky, the newly appointed Ambassador of Internet Sites at Yandex Search, discusses the company's evolving search algorithms, its approach to AI-generated content, and the introduction of a new ambassadorial role to enhance transparency and community engagement in search operations.

In a detailed interview with SEOnews, Mikhail Slivinsky, the newly appointed Ambassador of Internet Sites at Yandex Search, discusses the company's evolving search algorithms, its approach to AI-generated content, and the introduction of a new ambassadorial role to enhance transparency and community engagement in search operations.

In a recent dialogue with SEOnews, Mikhail Slivinsky, Yandex Search’s Ambassador of Internet Sites, shed light on the evolving landscape of search engines, particularly how Yandex is refining its algorithms and embracing neural network functions to better serve both webmasters and users.

The introduction of the ambassador role, according to Slivinsky, was driven by the community’s demand for more transparency and direct dialogue regarding search functionalities. This position aims to bridge the gap between Yandex’s search development teams and the webmaster community, ensuring that feedback and insights from the latter are effectively communicated and considered in search developments.

Slivinsky, who previously led the webmaster service at Yandex, emphasized the ongoing efforts to enhance the quality of content recognized by the search engine. These improvements are part of broader updates aimed at promoting high-quality, expert-level content, particularly in sensitive fields such as medicine where accuracy is crucial.

He also addressed the topic of AI-generated content. Yandex does not penalize the use of neural networks per se but focuses on the quality of the content they produce. If AI-generated content meets high-quality standards and proves beneficial for users, it is welcomed. However, low-quality content, whether produced by humans or AI, is likely to be downranked.

In his role, Slivinsky has already begun to receive queries and feedback from SEO specialists, marketers, and site owners, reflecting a proactive community eager to improve their visibility and performance in search results. He highlighted the importance of having a constructive, informed dialogue with the community, which has been instrumental in shaping Yandex’s approach to search optimization.

Regarding the future of search, Slivinsky believes that neural networks will play an increasingly significant role. The challenge lies not only in improving search technologies but also in ensuring that content producers can effectively compete and maintain quality in a rapidly changing digital environment.

The conversation with Slivinsky underscores Yandex’s commitment to refining its search algorithms in response to user and webmaster feedback, ensuring that the search experience continues to evolve in a way that benefits all stakeholders involved.

Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.