Yandex has started teaching publishers how to get into Alice’s answers — and the first lesson is not a schema trick. According to Rossiyskaya Gazeta’s report on 5 October 2026, Yandex Search and the education platform Synchronisation (“Синхронизация”) have launched a free course called “Писать для людей в эпоху ИИ” — roughly, “Writing for people in the age of AI”. The pitch is explicit: help brands and media produce material that is useful to readers, raise the odds of becoming a source for AI answers, and stay recognisable when that happens.
That last clause is the interesting bit. Yandex is not promising traffic. It is promising visibility, and admitting that visibility alone is not a relationship.
What is actually in the course
The course landing page (marked as advertising by Yandex LLC) is built around three lectures, each with a downloadable checklist:
- Mikhail Slivinsky, Yandex Search’s “ambassador for internet sites”, on how a page becomes a source for an Alice answer. The advice: ask what the person actually wants to understand, give a precise answer, and back it with facts, experience, a clear explanation or your own conclusions — “not another retelling”.
- Mikhail Vishnevsky, creative director and awards juror, on making useful content memorable: your own topic, your own angle, and a voice readers recognise without a byline.
- Zhanel Kuandykova, journalist and editor-in-chief of SETTERS Media, on how a media brand gets into AI answers and stays itself.
Slivinsky’s quote to RG is the thesis statement: an AI answer “can become the point of first contact with a brand or a publication, but one mention is not enough to build a connection with the audience”. The job is not to publish more, but to publish things people want to come back to — accurate facts, real expertise, a clear angle and a recognisable voice. He frames the course as three lenses: search (how AI answers are formed and what helps a page become a source), creative, and editorial.
The numbers Yandex did not put on the landing page
RG’s piece surrounds the launch with the context Yandex would probably rather you skimmed. It cites Brand Analytics estimating that Russian sites overall saw search traffic fall by 33–38% in 2025, and Kokoc Performance putting declines in informational niches at 15–60%, around 30% on average. Medialogia is quoted saying AI service sites worldwide drew about 9.5 billion visits a month between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year on year. Its PR director, Nadezhda Zhukovskaya, puts it plainly: users do not always need to click from a chatbot answer to the original source, so presence inside the answer matters as much as ranking position.
RG also sketches a Russian GEO services market that has appeared almost overnight: the GEOMI agency rating growing from 26 to 33 agencies between March and July, 149 contractors in one catalogue as of 28 September, packages from 50,000 roubles, a quoted average of 140,000–160,000 roubles a month, and more than 100 open vacancies for “neural network promotion” specialists according to Sostav.
Our take: this is official GEO guidance wearing a cardigan
Strip away the creative-writing framing and this is Yandex publishing its preferred answer to “how do I get cited by Alice?” The answer is the same one Google gives about helpful content: be the best primary source, not the tenth rewrite. That is consistent with what we have seen Yandex build. Alice answers are now a mass surface — 49.5 million monthly users on quick answers — and the flagship chat models went free with live search citations. Yandex Webmaster even added an Alice AI visibility tool earlier this year.
What the course does not do is tell you how often a citation becomes a click, and that is the number publishers care about. Vishnevsky’s own warning in the RG piece is the most honest line in the whole launch: the race for AI visibility has already flooded feeds and results with material that “looks right but sounds the same”. If every agency in Moscow runs the same checklist, Alice will be choosing between near-identical pages — and the tie-breaker will be precisely the things a checklist cannot manufacture: original data, first-hand experience and a name readers recognise.
Practical read for anyone working Yandex: take the course (it is free), but measure it like any other channel. Track Alice visibility in Webmaster alongside actual referral sessions, and keep investing in the assets that survive summarisation — proprietary numbers, named experts, and pages that answer the question better than the answer box does. More on the market in our Yandex SEO archive.