A year ago, Russian searchers still treated AI answers under the bar as optional. They do not any more. Communicating agency Faves Communications told CNews on 3 November that 89% of Russian internet users now factor AI answers into how they search on Yandex and Google, up from 52% a year earlier. Forty-three percent say the generated block is usually enough on its own (28% last year). Another 45% read it and then go looking for more. Fewer than 4% ignore the AI block completely, down from 17%. The share who say they have never even seen an AI answer in search has collapsed from roughly 25% to 3%.
That is the demand-side companion to the supply-side numbers Yandex put out with its Q3 results. We already covered that Alice AI now answers 44% of Yandex queries, with a monthly search-answer audience of 54.8 million. Faves restates the same Alice series — 46.5 million in Q4 2025, 48.3 million in Q1, 49.5 million in Q2, 54.8 million in Q3 — as an 18% year-on-year rise. What is new is the behavioural survey next to it, and the LiveInternet traffic cut that sits underneath.
Runet sites lose almost a third of their visitors
Faves’ read of LiveInternet.ru for September 2026 is the line SEOs and publishers should circle. Combined Runet site pageviews were 30% lower year on year. Unique visitors were down 29%. News and media sites were hit harder still: pageviews −44%, visitors −40%. That is not a soft “AI might divert some clicks” warning. It is a year of lost audience measured on the same panel Russian webmasters have used for decades.
The click-through story inside the survey is more nuanced than a simple zero-click panic. The share who never or almost never open a source link fell from 43% to 14%. At the same time, the share who always open the source fell from 21% to 8%. What grew instead is selective verification: nearly 78% now say they check the original when the information really matters, up from 36%. Trust in AI answers rose from 43% to 68%, and the biggest reason people give for that trust is the presence of authoritative citations (35%), not a belief that models cannot lie.
What this means for Russian SEO
Three practical implications follow. First, brand and publisher strategy on Yandex is no longer only about ranking ten blue links. It is about being the source Alice cites when 44% of queries get an AI answer and nearly nine in ten users look at that answer. Faves founder Yulia Tsareva’s own framing is blunt: media sites have a new audience in the form of AI agents, and native mentions in reputable outlets are how brands get into the answer. Second, traffic forecasting that still assumes 2024 click curves on informational and news queries will overstate visits — LiveInternet already shows a 29–30% hole. Third, the Mediascope Alice story we covered earlier (Alice reaching 48% of Russians as an AI product) and this Faves search survey are measuring different layers of the same shift: product reach versus in-SERP behaviour. Both are moving in the same direction.
My take
Treat 3 November as the date the Russian zero-click debate got a hard traffic number, not just a survey vibe. Annotate your Yandex organic dashboards for September 2026 against the LiveInternet −29%/−30% baseline before you blame a single algorithm tweak. For anyone pitching “get cited by Alice” work, the Faves trust split is useful: citations to authoritative sources are doing more of the persuasion than claims of model neutrality. Primary sources are the CNews write-up of the Faves briefing and Yandex’s own Q3 Alice audience figures already on the record.