Last week the biggest non-Google search story ended up in a courtroom. The New York Times and three Tribune papers took Brave to court over the index that sits underneath a good share of Western AI answers, and Brave answered with record usage figures and a new control that lets users shape what Ask Brave reads. In Russia, Yandex’s recovery from the data-centre attacks moved from “Webmaster is broken” to “rank tracking costs more now”. In China the demand data finally caught up with the agent-search price war, and Naver spent the week reorganising both its organic UGC and its ad inventory. Here are the stories from 2 to 8 November that matter if you work search outside the Google bubble, with our take on each.
Brave: sued, growing and handing control to users
The filing of the week was the New York Times and Tribune lawsuits against Brave. They target Ask Brave, the Search API and the browser’s paywall blocker. The evidence SEOs should read is the API test, where the LLM Context endpoint returned 1,291 of 1,295 words of a Times article verbatim. That is a retrieval claim, not a training-data claim, and it goes after the business model of selling an index to AI companies. Anyone whose AI visibility depends on Brave, which in practice means anyone who cares about Claude, should watch this case closely.
The next day Brendan Eich posted 130.77 million monthly users and 2.71 billion October searches, with 10.1% of searches coming from people who don’t use the Brave browser at all. That external share matters more than the headline number, because it means people are choosing Brave as a destination. Then on 5 November Brave put Rerank on Ask Brave, so users can boost or hide whole domains feeding the AI answer. Our take: personalised retrieval makes a single “Brave ranking” even harder to report, so baseline your visibility logged out and with clean cookies.
DuckDuckGo had the sharpest line of the week. After Google said schools that want AI off would have to switch Search off too, DuckDuckGo told schools they don’t need AI to search the web and pointed them at noai.duckduckgo.com. Education is one of the few places where defaults get decided by administrators rather than by deals, so this is a real distribution opening and not just a press opportunity.
Yandex: the recovery bill arrives
We started the week with Webmaster’s second recovery update, which brought back the API, recrawl speed, the Security section and Metrika binding. Adding new sites, submitting new sitemaps and requesting recrawls were still not confirmed. Then the costs started to show. From 1 November Yandex Search API runs only at night, at 10–20% of its old capacity, Cloud billing has resumed, and Pixel Tools has moved to live SERP parsing with a credit price list. Andrei Kalashnikov’s 2.7 million session study explains the October gaps in rank-tracking charts: stationary proxies hit 75–76% HTTP 429s while mobile packs held. Our take: if your Yandex charts jump around 30 October or 1 November, check whether your vendor changed its data source before you call it an update.
The AI side of the story didn’t let up. Faves found that 89% of Russians now factor AI answers into search, and LiveInternet shows Runet sites down 29% in visitors year on year, with news sites down 40%. Against that, Ainet’s eight-month expert-versus-AI test is a small but useful bit of good news: AI copy led in both engines mid-test and then faded, while expert texts ended the test ahead in Yandex and Google. It was one made-up query on ten fresh domains, so don’t overread it, but it matches what most of us see on real sites.
China: the demand data catches up with the price war
Baidu’s ¥4.9 per 1,000 calls Search AI API turned out to be a capped promotion on prepaid Enhanced bundles that runs to 31 December. QuestMobile then explained why everyone is fighting over agent search. China’s search apps lost 984 million hours of usage in September, and AIGC apps gained 978 million. That isn’t proof of a one-for-one swap, but if consumers are spending less time in search apps, selling search to agents is the obvious fallback. Tencent appears to agree: it is reportedly preparing a consumer AI search engine on the same Yuanbao–Sogou stack it already sells through Tencent Cloud.
On the model side, DeepSeek’s ¥105.5bn round came with a detail that matters for search. Investors were reportedly asked what data they could bring, and Meituan, Trip.com and Xiaohongshu are on the list. Apple, meanwhile, confirmed Qwen inside Siri, Visual Intelligence and Writing Tools in China from the 4 November beta, and its release doesn’t mention Baidu. That gives Alibaba a place on every Chinese iPhone. To help you keep track, we published three reference pages: DeepSeek Model Updates, ERNIE Model Updates and Qwen Model Updates. If Qwen is new to you, start with our beginner’s guide to Qwen and Qwen agents.
Naver: experience blocks, AI ad copy and new banners
Naver’s organic news was the Experience UGC block, live from 5 November. It groups Blog and Café reviews by topic and shows excerpts, tags and Café comments before anyone clicks. That rewards first-hand detail over keyword-stuffed posts, and it follows the integrated search shake-up the community reported from 29 October, which Naver has still not explained.
On ads, Powerlink’s AI copy feature returns as “phrase generation” from 11 November, with a live test from 12 to 19 November, and shopping ads are moving onto Naver News and Main on mobile. Naver will be paraphrasing your landing page into the SERP, so check that its prices and offers are current. Separately, the 750×280 mobile search-home banner stops taking new creatives on 2 December, replaced by 450×450 cut-outs with separate copy. Brief your designers now.
What to watch this week
Baidu World on 12 November is the big one. We expect it to show whether the ¥4.9 API is a strategy and where ERNIE goes next, and we’ll update the ERNIE page afterwards. Also watch Naver’s phrase generation toggle on Wednesday and its test from Thursday, Brave’s response to the lawsuits, and whether Yandex finally reopens new-site onboarding in Webmaster.