Last week the most important customers in non-Google search stopped being people. DeepSeek and Tencent both started selling their web search to developers and agents by the thousand calls, while Washington moved to rip DeepSeek out of federal systems altogether. Yandex spent the week finding out what the data-centre strikes had actually broken, and Naver quietly rebuilt half of its results page and its ad platform. Here are the stories from 19 to 25 October that matter if you work search outside the Google bubble, with our take on each.
China: search becomes a product you sell to machines
The week opened with DeepSeek opening its in-house search engine to developers through new Search and Fetch endpoints at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. The pricing is not the headline. The headline is DeepSeek’s claim that the engine filters “SEO spam, GEO manipulation, and low-quality AIGC”. If you are paying a vendor to get your brand into Chinese AI answers, that line describes the system you are trying to game, and it now says so in public documentation.
Three days later Tencent followed, opening Yuanbao Search from ¥14 per 1,000 calls as an API, an MCP server and an agent Skill. It is built on the Sogou index plus Tencent’s own content, with 157 “authoritative” sources layered on top. Between them, DeepSeek and Tencent are turning search into a utility that agents buy wholesale. Our take: in China, being indexed and trusted by these back-end engines is quickly becoming the visibility that counts, whether or not a human ever sees a results page.
DeepSeek also open-sourced DeepInfer, the framework that serves its production answers, with deterministic output and Huawei Ascend support. Then it closed a reported ¥100bn ($15bn) round led by CATL and Tencent, at roughly a $74bn valuation. The counterweight came from the US, where the Department of Homeland Security ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek, including third-party products built on it. The money and the bans are now moving in opposite directions, and anyone building on DeepSeek’s new search API for Western clients should read that order first.
For context on where the capital is going, CNNIC’s figures show China put about RMB250 billion into AI in H1 2026, with robotics taking the largest slice, while US money concentrated in two model labs.
Chinese SERPs: fewer ads, more events
We had been holding the Baidu and Sogou ad-hiding story for a fortnight because it rested on a single social post. It now has a trade report behind it: Bing China has joined Baidu and Sogou in letting users hide search ads with one click, leaving 360 as the last holdout. We have not verified it from inside China, and Baidu’s version is described as a partial test, but a world where paid results are optional is a world where organic and AI answer visibility carry more weight.
Weibo, meanwhile, is rebuilding its hot search landing pages around events and viewpoints rather than recency, so older posts without the hashtag can now surface. That rewards substance over speed, which is good news for brands that publish properly rather than piling onto a trend.
Yandex: the outage hangover
Two weeks on from the strikes, Yandex is mostly back, but the damage is now showing up in the data. Our Monday forum recap found Metrika had effectively forgotten every visit before 11 October, so some paid visits now appear as organic. If a client reports a 30% jump in Yandex organic traffic this month, check the attribution model before you take the credit.
The Yandex Search API came back on a night shift, with asynchronous checks only between midnight and 6am Moscow time. Direct became fully editable again after nine days, but Webmaster’s recrawl and removal tools stayed read-only. By Friday our second recap showed the real cost: fresh pages taking days to reach the index, with IndexNow becoming the workaround. Once again, money came back first and the SEO tools came back last.
None of this has slowed Alice. Mediascope data shows Alice AI reached 48% of Russians aged 12 and over in September, about four times DeepSeek’s reach, and Yandex is promising a “large-scale” Alice AI update within weeks on the back of 14% month-on-month growth in app users. The most useful study of the week sat alongside it: Alice AI and ChatGPT named just 9 of 30 local firms from Yandex’s first pages, and Maps ratings and reviews mattered more than rankings. Ranking is not the same as being chosen, and this is the clearest local evidence of that we have seen in the Russian market.
Naver: a busy week for the results page and the ad stack
Naver pulled Related Questions out of AI Briefing from 22 October, turning them into a standalone block whose answers expand inline, even on queries where no Briefing shows. That is more answer surface, and fewer reasons to click away. It also started answering university admissions directly in the SERP, a high-stakes vertical where official sources now compete with Naver’s own summary.
On the commercial side, the changes stacked up. Shopping search ads move onto Smartstore and Brandstore product pages from 28 October, right under the seller’s own information. A new restaurant Place listing goes into test from 29 October, with badges for reservation surges and revisits that ads cannot buy, alongside 6,066 new Power Contents keywords. And the Ad Centre becomes “N Ads” on 4 November, with one-tap AI recommendations and prompt-built audiences. Our Naver community recap caught the organic side moving too, with Blog tab top spots reshuffling and websites piling into integrated search.
Elsewhere
Kagi had to make its Translate proxy pages noindex after copies outranked the blogs they proxied, a reminder to check who is serving your content under another domain. Seznam AI now has hundreds of thousands of weekly users and is wiring in Sreality, with Mapy.com and Sauto next. And if you missed it, here is the preview of Dan Taylor’s Asia SEO Summit talk on how Asia’s engines built their own AI answers.
The week in one line
Search engines outside Google spent the week selling themselves to machines, hiding their own ads and answering more questions in place. The brands that win from here are the ones these systems choose, describe accurately and send measurable demand to, not just the ones that rank.