If last week was the week non-Google search started selling itself to machines, this was the week the price war broke out. Baidu spent Tuesday defending a ¥36 search API and Friday cutting it to ¥4.9. DeepSeek switched on billing for agent search calls and filled in the investor list behind its second mega-round. Yandex put a number on how much of its results page Alice AI now owns, while Naver lined up more ads, more AI Briefing and a ranking wobble its community could not explain. Here are the stories from 26 October to 1 November that matter if you work search outside the Google bubble, with our take on each.
China: the agent-search price war gets real
On Tuesday we noted that Baidu’s Search API still cost ¥36 per 1,000 calls, the priciest option in a market where DeepSeek charges about ¥5 and Tencent’s Sogou-based Yuanbao Search starts at ¥14. Three days later Baidu folded. At a Baidu App briefing on 30 October it launched a promotional ¥4.9 per 1,000 calls for its Enhanced search API, pitched explicitly as cheaper than DeepSeek. The small print matters: the offer runs to 31 December and is capped at a million calls, after which the ¥40 list price returns. Our full write-up goes out later today. Our take: a capped promotion is a land grab, not a new floor, but it confirms that the grounding layer for Chinese agents will be decided on price as much as on index quality.
DeepSeek, meanwhile, started billing Search and Fetch calls made through Claude Code, Codex and its own harness at 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November (16:00 GMT on 31 October), and the investor list for its reported ¥105.5bn round emerged. The detail that caught our eye was investors being asked what data they could bring. When Meituan, Trip.com and Xiaohongshu are on the cap table, brand visibility in DeepSeek answers may run through those platforms as much as through your website. Brave is heading the same way from the West: its bx402 project lets an AI agent buy a single Brave search for $0.005 in stablecoins, with no account and no API key.
On the consumer side, Tencent stripped Sogou’s homepage down to a search box and an AI mode powered by Yuanbao, and Sogou Wenwen closes on 7 November. If you still have Q&A content sitting on Wenwen, export it this week. Baidu put a real doctor underneath the AI health answer, which is a polite way of saying open-web health publishers now compete for the space below both. And Baidu, ByteDance’s Ocean Engine, Tencent and 360 signed a Beijing marketing pact that requires AI labels and named sources. It is self-regulation for now, but it is the clearest hint yet of where GEO-style placement in Chinese answers will hit compliance.
Two policy and security stories round it off. MOFCOM said API, app and SaaS access to Chinese models isn’t a technology export, which is reassuring for anyone building on DeepSeek. Less reassuring was Cohere’s report that Qwen3.8-Flash-Next tried to upload a file to a Beijing bucket after saying it wouldn’t. Sandbox open-weight agents properly, whoever made them.
Yandex: Alice AI at 44%, Webmaster still half-built
The number of the week came from Yandex’s Q3 results: Alice AI now answers 44% of search queries, up from 42% in Q2, while the company withdrew its 2026 guidance because of the data-centre attacks. Nearly half of Yandex results pages now start with an AI answer, so Russian SEO reporting that only counts blue-link positions is measuring the smaller half of the page.
The commercial side looks steadier than the technical side. Yandex says advertisers didn’t leave after the attacks, and Chinese companies have spent more than ₽10bn on Yandex in nine months, 2.4 times last year. Indexing is another matter. The SEENGO log study showed new pages ignored, old pages recrawled 91 times and IndexNow returning 200 with no visit. Yandex says its supercomputers survived and are being moved, and on 29 October Webmaster got its API, Security section and recrawl speed setting back. New sites, new sitemaps and the Site move tool were still reported stuck as the week ended. Our take: trust your server logs over the dashboard until Yandex says otherwise.
Naver: more ads, more AI, and a wobble
Naver’s ad team was busiest. The Shopping Search Ads Quality Index gives way to a 1–10 Click Expectation Index on 25 November, the N Ads rebrand and new terms land on 4 November, and from 5 November Naver will test up to nine Place ads in mobile search. That last one takes space directly from organic local listings, so local businesses should benchmark their Place visibility before Thursday.
On the organic side, Naver put AI Briefing on the CSAT and earnings calls and began paying Clip creators when its AI cites them from 1 November. Paying creators for citations is the model every Western publisher has been asking Google for, and Naver is doing it inside its own walls. Then, late on 29 October, i-boss threads filled with reports of fresh posts ranking instantly and brand websites vanishing for their own names. Naver said nothing. Our community recap goes out later today; in the meantime, log your brand-name SERPs in Korean and English.
Europe: choice screens and the wrong metric
In the UK, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Yahoo used the CMA consultation to argue that Play Store downloads are the wrong way to pick choice-screen winners. They are right that a metric Google controls should not decide who gets the guaranteed slots. Whether the CMA agrees will shape the UK’s best chance in years of moving search share.
What to watch this week
Naver’s N Ads launch on Wednesday and the Place ads test on Thursday, Sogou Wenwen’s closure on Saturday, and whether Yandex finally reopens new sites and sitemaps in Webmaster. Further out, Baidu World on 12 November should tell us whether ¥4.9 was a promotion or a strategy.