Yandex published its third-quarter 2026 results this morning, and the number that matters most for anyone doing search in Russia is not revenue. It is this: Alice AI now gives an answer in Yandex Search for 44% of queries.
The same release also does something Yandex has not done in years. It withdraws its 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance, citing the October drone attacks on its data centres. So we get two stories in one document: AI answers keep taking over the results page, and the company behind them admits it can no longer forecast the rest of the year.
The AI search numbers
From the Search and AI section of the release:
- The share of queries where Alice AI answers in Search reached 44%. In Q2 it was 42%, when Yandex said the monthly audience for Alice’s quick answers was 49.5 million.
- The monthly audience for Alice AI answers under the search bar rose 11% quarter on quarter to 54.8 million people.
- Weekly users who work on tasks with Alice AI in chat rose 36% quarter on quarter to 45 million.
- 46 million people a month use Alice AI and other AI features in Yandex Browser. Separately, Yandex told CNews that the Browser reached 104 million monthly active devices in September, 9 million more than at the start of the quarter.
My read: 44% is a big number, but the curve is flattening. A two-point rise in a quarter is much slower than the jumps we saw earlier in the year. The cheap queries, the definitions and the quick facts, are already answered. The rest of the market is harder to reach: commercial, local and transactional queries, where Yandex makes its money from ads and where a generated answer is riskier. In September Mediascope said 48% of Russians used Alice AI. Today’s figures suggest the headroom is moving from reach to depth.
The ad numbers
Ad and promotion turnover grew 9% year on year to ₽136 billion in Q3, and 10% to ₽379 billion over nine months. Yandex blames “difficult macroeconomic conditions” and cautious small-business budgets. Newer formats (DOOH, connected TV and messenger ads) grew 72%. Entertainment (+37%), IT (+22%) and medicine and pharma (+21.4%) were the fastest-growing advertiser categories. Ad budgets from foreign companies rose 62% over nine months, and small-business ad spend on Yandex Maps rose 12.5%.
The Search and AI segment as a whole grew only 4% to ₽144.7 billion. Yandex puts that down to weaker smart-device sales after logistics disruption from attacks on marketplace warehouses, soft classifieds, and the sale of Auto.ru. Segment adjusted EBITDA rose 7% to ₽67.3 billion, a 46.5% margin.
Here is the claim I would want independent data to test. Yandex is answering almost half of queries with AI and search advertising still grows. It has not hit the “AI answers kill the ad click” wall that many expected. But 9% growth in an inflationary market with cautious SMBs is not a boom either. The ads are coping. They are not thriving.
Guidance withdrawn
The section on events after the reporting date is the bluntest Yandex has been about October. Several data centres were hit by drones and part of the infrastructure was damaged. This happened after the quarter closed, so Q3 is unaffected, and the company “continues to assess the consequences”. All user and business services are restored “with key functions available”, with engineers still working to bring back everything else. Yandex is moving to a “more distributed” infrastructure model. It will not raise capex this year (₽115 billion over nine months) because it had already bought reserve capacity. It will consider publishing guidance again from next quarter.
For SEOs, “key functions” is the important phrase. We have spent a fortnight documenting what the outage did to Webmaster and indexing of new pages. A results release that says everything is back, while webmasters still see new URLs ignored, tells you which customers come first. It is the same pattern as the advertiser messaging last week.
What I would do with this
Treat the 44% as the share of your Yandex demand that now sees an AI answer before it sees you. Then check whether you are in that answer. Webmaster has a visibility in Alice AI report for exactly this. Use it once your site’s data is flowing again, and do not take Yandex’s own percentages as your own traffic reality.
A caveat, in line with how we handle numbers here: these are unaudited company figures with company-defined metrics. “Share of queries with an Alice AI answer” is Yandex’s measure, not a third-party one. The earnings call is at 13:00 Moscow time (10:00 GMT) today. If management says anything about search share, Webmaster or the recovery timeline, we will follow up.