If your Yandex rank tracking has been blank since the data-centre strikes, there’s partial good news. The official Yandex Search API is running again, but its asynchronous (deferred) mode only works from 00:00 to 06:00 Moscow time. Rank trackers are now scheduling their Yandex checks around that night window.
Yandex Cloud’s recovery recommendations page was last updated on 19 October at 17:15 Moscow time. It says: “We recommend using synchronous mode, but delays are possible. Asynchronous mode works only from 00:00 to 06:00 MSK.” The same restriction first appeared in Yandex Cloud’s 14 October AI-services status update, which Fontanka reported.
Topvisor reschedules around the night shift
Topvisor is the first big Russian rank tracker to act on it. A banner across its news journal now says Search API checks have partially resumed. You can queue them between 20:00 and 05:00, and the checks themselves start at midnight. Topvisor points users who need data at any other time to its “Yandex SERP” mode. It launched that emergency live-results collector on 14 October, when it suspended every API-based check and refunded the ones caught mid-run. SERP mode covers desktop and mobile with a default depth of 10, extendable to 30. Topvisor says it will keep SERP mode after the API fully recovers.
Western tools that scrape Yandex have had a bumpy week too. SerpApi’s Yandex release notes list an “unstable success rate” fix dated 14 October.
Meanwhile, the Yandex Cloud status board still lists Search API under the open “Yandex Cloud zones unavailable” incident, which began at 04:00 Moscow time on 11 October. So “partially resumed” is accurate: it works, on Yandex’s terms, at Yandex’s hours.
Why the night window matters more than it sounds
Asynchronous mode is the batch mode: you submit a pile of queries and collect the results later. It is the mode every serious position-tracking setup uses, because the synchronous mode is rate-limited and, Yandex now warns, slow. Restricting async to six overnight hours is clearly a load-shedding decision. Yandex is protecting daytime capacity for its own users and paying customers while three data centres are still out of action.
Four practical consequences:
- Your data is overnight data. Checks between 00:00 and 06:00 MSK are 22:00 to 04:00 BST, or 21:00 to 03:00 GMT once UK clocks go back on Sunday 25 October. Night-time SERPs are a different sample: fewer fresh news results and, for some local and commercial queries, different blends. Don’t compare them like-for-like with daytime history.
- API and live-SERP positions aren’t the same series. If you switched to scraped live results last week and switch back now, annotate both changes. A one-position jump on the day you change source is almost certainly a methodology artefact, not an update.
- The rankings themselves are still noisy. We reported that YandexBot crawling collapsed during the outage, and Webmaster still says some reports are delayed “because of slow crawling by the robot”. Positions measured this week reflect an index that has not been refreshed normally since early October.
- Metrika is still unreliable for cross-checking. On the SearchEngines.guru outage thread, users said on 19 October that Metrika was showing zero visits, and one asked whether a new interface had been rushed out after the attacks. Our latest Yandex forum recap covers the attribution reset. Don’t validate ranking moves against Metrika traffic until it settles.
There’s one small consolation. Yandex Cloud says all its services are free for existing customers in Russian availability zones from 8 to 31 October, and on Yandex’s own wording that should include Search API usage. If you need to backfill missing history, the next 11 nights are the cheapest time to do it.
More on the recovery in our Yandex SEO coverage.