Yandex Claims Top Spot Over Google in Russian Search Market

In a recent interview with Kommersant, Dmitry Masyuk of Yandex declared that the company has overtaken Google in terms of search market share across all platforms in Russia, highlighting significant user preference shifts.

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

In a recent interview with Kommersant, Dmitry Masyuk of Yandex declared that the company has overtaken Google in terms of search market share across all platforms in Russia, highlighting significant user preference shifts.

In an insightful interview with Kommersant, Dmitry Masyuk, director of the Search and Advertising Technologies business group at Yandex, announced a significant milestone for the company. Yandex has officially surpassed Google to become the leader in internet search market share across all platforms in Russia, a feat achieved under what Masyuk describes as “competitive conditions.”

Masyuk highlighted the remarkable achievement in the mobile sector, noting that in 2023, Yandex captured over 50% of the search market share on iPhones, where Google is pre-set as the default search engine. This indicates a strong user preference for Yandex, as more than half of iPhone users in Russia have opted to switch their default search settings.

The overall growth of Yandex’s market share is evident, with the fourth quarter figures showing an average of 63.8%. This growth comes despite the company’s strategic decision to redirect direct visitors from yandex.ru to the Zen page by VK, which is not a part of Yandex. This move was part of broader efforts to diversify the user experience and integrate more content-focused features.

Additionally, Masyuk teased the launch of an upcoming product that integrates search capabilities with generative neural networks. Described as the most radical update in the past two decades, this new development is set to further revolutionize how users interact with information online.

Yandex’s achievement in overtaking Google in Russia signifies a major shift in the digital landscape, reflecting the dynamic nature of the tech industry and the evolving preferences of internet users. This development underscores Yandex’s ongoing commitment to innovation and its ability to adapt to and lead in competitive markets.

Dan Taylor
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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.
Founder & Editor