Yandex Invests $50 Million To Boost Search Services In Türkiye

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Yandex is increasing its presence in Türkiye with a $50 million investment aimed at enhancing its search engine technology. This move is part of a larger $400 million plan that the company announced last year.

Alexander Popovskiy, General Manager of Yandex Türkiye and CEO of Yandex Search International, shared the news at WORLDEF Istanbul 2025. He said Türkiye’s fast-growing e-commerce market offers a strong opportunity for digital innovation.

New Tools For E-Commerce

Popovskiy introduced Yandex Türkiye Merchants, a platform designed to help online sellers get more traffic and manage their visibility in search results. He said the tool is especially useful for businesses looking to improve their online performance.

In addition, he highlighted Yandex Metrica, a free analytics tool that helps platforms understand user behavior. Yandex Ads, the company’s global advertising network, is also being promoted to Turkish businesses.

“Many Turkish companies are already successfully using Yandex Ads to grow their reach and boost their sales,” he said.

AI-Powered Search Gains Popularity

Yandex’s AI search tool Yazeka is becoming more popular in Türkiye. It provides answers using text, images, and video, offering users a more complete search experience.

“Customers now are using AI more and more,” Popovskiy said. “It helps them to solve their traditional searching tasks faster and in a more comprehensive way.”

The company has recently improved Yazeka by adding visual and video content to help users handle more complex search topics.

Regulatory Praise And Future Plans

Popovskiy praised Türkiye’s e-commerce regulations and encouraged similar policies for search engines and browsers. He said such efforts have helped shape the local digital landscape.

He also hinted at more updates from Yandex Türkiye soon. These will include changes to its search engine, Yandex Maps, and other services.

“We are focusing on improving as a search engine currently,” he said. “Fasten your seatbelts; there will be a lot of new announcements.”

Yandex’s latest investment underscores its commitment to Türkiye’s tech ecosystem and signals more growth ahead.

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