Here’s a number every Yandex-market SEO should keep handy: 59 million people in Russia, 48% of everyone aged 12 and over, used Alice AI in September. That comes from new Mediascope data on AI services. DeepSeek came second with 13 million (11%), and nothing else was close.
The figures come from Mediascope’s Cross Web measurement. They were first reported by RBC and then by RB.ru, Habr and ITZine. ITZine says Mediascope presented them at the Hi-Tech Mail.ru conference.
The numbers
- 55% of Russians aged 12+ used an AI service’s website or app in September 2026. A year earlier (autumn 2025) the figure was 26%, so it has more than doubled.
- Alice AI: 59m monthly users (48%), up from 14% reach in October 2025. Mediascope says that is almost nine out of ten AI-service users in the country.
- DeepSeek: 13m (11%), up from 9%.
- Third place is disputed. RB.ru and Habr give it to GigaChat with 6m (5%). ITZine points out that some outlets name ChatGPT instead, and says the published data doesn’t settle it. A year ago GigaChat and ChatGPT were both on about 5%.
- 12% use AI services every day, and AI accounts for just 1.3% of Russians’ total internet time.
The caveat that matters for search
Mediascope counted only the websites and mobile apps of AI services. Chatbots inside messengers are excluded, and so, explicitly, are AI answers inside search engines. In other words, the Alice AI quick answers above Yandex’s organic results, which we’ve watched spread to around 15% of ecommerce queries, aren’t part of the 59 million. People who meet Alice in the search results come on top of that.
But there is an attribution question the coverage skips. Alice AI is not only a standalone chatbot; it is built into the Yandex app and Yandex Browser, which are search products. Without Mediascope’s methodology we can’t tell how much of the 59 million is “AI service” use and how much is people opening the Yandex app, where the line between searching and asking has largely disappeared. Treat the headline as an upper bound on dedicated chatbot use and a lower bound on Alice exposure.
Why this is a Yandex SEO story, not just an AI one
Three takeaways:
- In Russia, “optimising for AI” mostly means Alice. Outside Russia, GEO discussions are about ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. In Russia, Alice’s monthly reach is more than four times DeepSeek’s and roughly ten times GigaChat’s. Yandex’s free course on getting cited in Alice AI and the Alice visibility report in Webmaster suddenly look less like nice-to-haves.
- DeepSeek is the real number two, and it doesn’t use Yandex’s index. 13 million Russians are getting answers grounded in a different search engine, now DeepSeek’s in-house one. If you care about AI visibility in Russia, check how your brand appears in DeepSeek too.
- Reach is not dependence yet. Daily use is 12% and AI takes 1.3% of online time, so most people dip in rather than live there. That gap is where search still earns its traffic. But the trend line has doubled in a year.
One more thing: these are September numbers, from before drone strikes took out three Yandex data centres between 8 and 11 October and knocked Alice offline for days. October’s figures will show whether that outage pushed users to DeepSeek and GigaChat or whether they simply waited for Alice to come back. Most Alice functions were back by 14 October, and Alice was already the default answer engine in the local-business citation study we covered yesterday, so our bet is on users waiting.
More in our Yandex AI and Russian Market News sections.