Yandex Search Türkiye Grows 75% in 2025 With AI-Focused Strategy

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Yandex Search Türkiye has expanded its user base by over 75% in 2025, driven by AI-powered features tailored to the local market. CEO Alexander Popovskiy confirmed the growth during his remarks at the 8th Türkiye Artificial Intelligence Summit in Istanbul.

He credited the rise to strong adoption of “Yazeka with Yandex Search,” a service launched in late 2024 that now handles more than 40% of all search queries on the platform.

AI Tools Gain Ground With Turkish Users

Popovskiy pointed to the growing popularity of AI chatbots and smart search tools among Turkish users, especially the younger generation. People are increasingly turning to AI for daily needs, including general research, personal guidance and even medical advice.

Yazeka’s user base has doubled since the beginning of 2025, highlighting strong interest in more conversational, adaptive AI systems.

Focused Localization Drives Adoption

Yandex’s success in Türkiye is largely due to its localized approach. Popovskiy emphasized that adapting tools to the Turkish language and cultural preferences has been key to their rapid growth.

Looking ahead to 2026, Yandex plans to release a new application built specifically for Türkiye. Popovskiy described it as a step toward a “next-generation internet” experience that will reshape how users interact with online services.

Building Toward Agentic AI Experiences

Yandex is also pushing forward with “agentic AI” — systems that act autonomously to complete tasks rather than just assist users. One example already live is their shopping comparison tool, which helps Turkish users find better deals across online stores.

Popovskiy believes this type of AI will become more common in Türkiye over the next few years, marking a major change in how people use digital platforms.

With a combination of local focus and next-gen AI tools, Yandex Search Türkiye is positioning itself for continued growth in an increasingly competitive market.

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