Twenty minutes. Eight engines. Zero Google.
That is the brief for Not-Google 2026 Recap, a live LinkedIn webinar hosted and presented by Dan Taylor of International Search Insights. It is a fast highlight show: the five biggest not-Google moments of 2026, and five bets for 2027, across Baidu, Naver, Yandex, Qwen, DeepSeek, Shenma, Cốc Cốc and Swisscows.
Register on the LinkedIn event page. The date and start time are listed there.
The year global search splintered
2026 was the year the big non-Google engines stopped moving in lockstep. The session teaser already names four of the storylines we have been covering here.
Naver put ads inside AI summaries. Search ads began appearing on the AI Briefing surface from 21 July, delivered through ADVoost Max, which is a clearer monetisation of generative answers than most Western engines have attempted so far.
DeepSeek launched its own Search API on 17 October, opening Search and Fetch endpoints on an in-house index, with a public authority tier and a filter it says screens SEO spam and GEO manipulation. The DeepSeek Model Updates page tracks what followed.
Qwen previewed Qwen4-Max, now on Alibaba’s token plan, still without a model card and with a 25 November deadline hanging over it. The fuller record sits on Qwen Model Updates.
The teaser also flags that Baidu’s AI agents grew 6x. That figure is Dan’s to unpack on the call, rather than a claim we have separately documented here. What we have covered is the rest of Baidu’s year, including a search-model API from Baidu World 2026, plus the running ERNIE Model Updates and Baidu algorithm histories.
If you want a written taster of the 2027 half, today’s predictions piece sets out forecasts for six of the eight engines, each tied to a 2026 signal and a confidence level.
The eight engines in brief
- Baidu. China’s default engine is now built around ERNIE, with APIs, Search Widgets and AI-traffic tools for publishers. The algorithm history is the long view.
- Naver. Korea’s engine is monetising AI Briefing and the AI Tab, while citations stay inside Naver Blog and Cafe. See the Naver algorithm updates.
- Yandex. Alice AI answered 44% of search queries by the third quarter, and is now testing phone calls to businesses on a user’s behalf. The Yandex algorithm history sits alongside that.
- Qwen. Alibaba’s model family now sits under a large share of Chinese AI answers. The beginner’s guide to Qwen and Qwen agents is the map if you are catching up.
- DeepSeek. The chatbot grew an actual search engine this year, with ranking rules of its own, which is a different proposition from a model that merely reads someone else’s results.
- Shenma. Alibaba’s mobile engine is easy to overlook next to Quark and Qwen, but it still matters for commerce and still arrives largely through UC Browser.
- Cốc Cốc. Vietnam’s homegrown engine shows AI answers on most informational queries and almost none of the commercial ones, which is a useful limit on the AI-search story.
- Swisscows. The Swiss privacy engine spent 2026 drawing a harder line: anonymous search is now a paid product, and its family filter behaves like a ranking system.
Who it’s for
This is aimed at international SEOs, at brands that have to win in China, Korea, Russia or Vietnam, and at the AI-search teams now being asked to measure citations rather than just blue links. If your 2027 plan still starts and ends with Google, twenty minutes should be enough to show why that is no longer enough.
Grab a coffee, drop in for 20 minutes, and leave with a multi-engine look ahead for 2027.
Register for Not-Google 2026 Recap on LinkedIn. The date and start time are on the event page.
