For the second week running, the biggest story in non-Google search was a building, not an algorithm. A third Yandex data centre went dark, and the tools Russian-market SEOs and advertisers use every day — Webmaster, Metrika, Direct — spent the week coming back one at a time, in an order that told you exactly where search marketers rank. Around it, China’s regulators fined GEO vendors for gaming AI answers, 151 Chinese apps told ByteDance’s phone agent to stay out, Naver rebuilt its organic results, and Startpage admitted most of its traffic is now bots. Here are the stories from 12 to 18 October that matter if you work search outside the Google bubble, with our take on each.
Yandex: Vladimir goes dark, and the SEO tools come back last
Overnight on 10–11 October drones hit Yandex’s Vladimir site — the third data centre in four days. This time the damage reached the professional tools: Metrika and Webmaster went blank, the Direct interface locked advertisers out, and Yandex Cloud told customers, in a statement quoted by Vedomosti, that it was “operating in emergency mode”. Our forum recap caught webmasters reporting that YandexBot had gone quiet and that Neuro answers had thinned out, with some clicks returning as a result.
The recovery order was the story. Yandex Pay came back before Webmaster, Metrika and Direct, and advertisers still could not pause campaigns. By Wednesday Direct top-ups returned, but only via managers and support, while Metrika quietly backfilled data behind a dark interface. When Webmaster did reopen, our second forum recap found it effectively read-only, with query data stuck on 6 October.
Then Cloudflare put numbers on it. Its outage analysis (original post) shows Yandex’s search network dropping 99% below baseline on 11 October, and nearly all of the lost traffic being verified YandexBot. The kicker: 40.5% of Cloudflare customers were already returning 403s to the crawler.
Our take: Yandex protected consumers and payments first, and treated the people who feed its index and buy its ads as a later problem. That is a business decision, not a scandal — but it means a fortnight of Russian-market reporting now has a hole in it. Annotate 6–15 October in every dashboard, check your logs for YandexBot recovery, and do not read slow indexing over the coming weeks as a quality signal.
China: GEO gets regulated, apps lock out agents
The most important China story for anyone selling “AI visibility” was regulators fining three GEO vendors. The fines are small — ¥50,000 in the Shenzhen case — but the framing is not: the regulator treated probing AI systems for their inclusion rules and then feeding them invented rankings as unfair competition. Meanwhile 151 apps, including WeChat, Taobao, Qwen and DeepSeek, opted out of ByteDance’s Doubao phone agent as its SAEP notice period closed — effectively a robots.txt for AI agents that operate apps through the screen.
Alibaba opened a waitlist for “Qwen Go!”, a personal agent that chased a flight-delay refund and worked Taobao price protection without the user touching a website. And Apple Intelligence was approved in China with Qwen powering the models; China Daily reports Baidu handles search, Siri-related functions and Visual Intelligence, although Apple has not confirmed Baidu’s role. Finally, DeepSeek went down for nearly five hours, then refunded a full week of usage as credit.
Our take: China is writing the rules for generative search faster than anyone. Gaming AI answers is now a legal risk, agents are getting a formal opt-out, and the default iPhone in China may soon route questions to Baidu. If your China plan still ends at “rank on Baidu”, it is out of date. DeepSeek’s generous refund, meanwhile, tells you reliability has become a competitive issue rather than a footnote.
Naver: one layout, and AI that cites itself
On the organic side, Naver gave web, Blog, Cafe, Knowledge iN and video results one layout from 15 October and scrapped “Related channels”, so documents that used to sit in that box now have to rank on their own. On the paid side, Trend Pick on the mobile Shopping tab moved to ADVoost, with logged-out users seeing Super Points promos — another fixed placement turned into auction inventory.
The data story was a study showing Naver’s AI Briefing cites Naver Blog 46.5% of the time, against zero citations in more than 42,000 ChatGPT and Gemini answers. Share trackers did not settle anything either: Internettrend has Google taking 1.19 points off Naver in September, but it and StatCounter now disagree by more than 20 points on who actually leads. Our community recap covered Powerlink ranks shifting by who is logged in, a 3-million-page site vanishing from site: searches, and blogs renting for 2 million won a year.
Our take: Korea now has two separate generative citation pools. Naver’s AI cites Naver; the global models ignore it. Choose your share source deliberately before it decides your budget for you, and audit any rankings that relied on the old related-channels box this week.
Independents and Vietnam: bots and AI boxes
Startpage said bots now make up 70% of its traffic, up from 35% in 2024, which explains the proof-of-work checks and sign-in prompts. It pays for every Google and Bing result it resells, including the ones scrapers take. In Vietnam, our own 100-query test found Cốc Cốc showing AI answers on 80% of informational searches but just 6% of commercial ones, and Cốc Cốc’s Q3 trends report showed searches for “iPhone 18 price” up 2,802% quarter on quarter, against 532% for plain “iPhone 18”.
Our take: resold search is being eaten by AI scrapers, and the bill is now landing on users as friction. On Cốc Cốc, informational content is where AI answers bite first; commercial pages have a window, and price-modifier queries are where Vietnamese demand is actually moving.
What to watch this week
Whether Webmaster impressions after 6 October ever come back, and how long Direct stays manager-only. Whether more GEO enforcement cases surface in China, and whether Doubao actually honours its refusal list. How the new Naver layout reshuffles Blog and Cafe visibility now that related channels are gone. And whether DeepSeek’s stability fixes hold — two outages in a week is a pattern. See you next Monday.