Dan Taylor

Founder & Editor
Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.

Yandex Direct Landings Go Multi-Page, and the Backup Page for Whitelist Shutdowns Reaches Small-Business Campaigns

Yandex has rolled out a set of updates to Direct’s built-in landing page builder. Read the Yandex Advertising news feed for 12 November without context and it looks like routine housekeeping: multi-page sites, cloning, an AI helper. Read it next ...

Yahoo Is the First Licensee of the Internet Licensing Collective: Publishers Get Paid When Scout Uses, and Cites, Their Content

One day after Yahoo Scout left beta and took over Yahoo Search, Yahoo gave publishers a reason to care where Scout gets its answers. On 12 November, Digiday reported that Yahoo is the first licensee of the Internet Licensing Collective ...

Yandex Launches Alice AI ‘Act!’: A Cloud Browser That Fills In Your Forms, Phone Calls and MCP Plugins

Yesterday we wrote about Alice AI phoning businesses for users, based on a Vedomosti interview about a test. A few hours later Yandex made it official, and the phone calls are only part of it. The new mode is called ...

Naver Q3: AI Ads Lift Powerlink Click-Through 11%, and Naver Will Start Billing on Completed Transactions in 2027

Naver reported its third-quarter numbers on 12 November, and for search marketers the headline isn’t the record ₩3.47 trillion in revenue. It’s what CEO Choi Soo-yeon said on the earnings call about how Naver plans to charge for ads once ...

Not-Google 2026 Recap: A 20-Minute Live Look at 8 Search Engines and 2027

Dan Taylor hosts a 20-minute live LinkedIn recap of the five biggest not-Google moments of 2026 and five bets for 2027, across Baidu, Naver, Yandex, Qwen, DeepSeek, Shenma, Cốc Cốc and Swisscows. ...

2027 Predictions: Baidu, Yandex, Naver, Cốc Cốc, DeepSeek and Qwen

My forecasts for 2027 across Baidu, Yandex, Naver, Cốc Cốc, DeepSeek and Qwen, each tied to a 2026 signal and given a confidence level, with what it means for international SEOs. ...

Naver Community Recap: The ‘Freshness War’ Continues, ‘Blog Index Deleted’ Claims and an Afternoon Indexing Stall

Our last Naver community recap on 2 November covered the integrated search shake-up that started on the night of 29 October. Fresh posts were ranking almost instantly and some brand websites had disappeared. Ten days later the Korean SEO forums ...

Naver Starts Matching Clinics to Symptom and Procedure Searches From 12 November, With 30 Keywords and Wider Place Ads

From today, 12 November, Naver starts matching clinics and hospitals to a far wider set of searches. Until now, Naver’s medical Place results were built mainly around disease names as defined by HIRA, Korea’s Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service. ...

Yandex’s Alice AI Starts Phoning Businesses for Users, as Yandex Ads Says Brands Must Now Win Over AI Agents

Yandex’s Alice AI has started picking up the phone for its users. Product manager Sergei Mikhailov told Vedomosti on 12 November that the assistant is now calling organisations and private individuals on a user’s behalf, in a test. It can ...

Brave Search Will Encrypt Every Result Link After Google’s ‘goto’ Change Pushed Scrapers Onto Its Index

Brave Search is about to stop linking straight to websites. In a blog post on 11 November, Brave said that “in the upcoming days” every result link will go through a cloaking scheme: a search.brave.com/go/v1#… address with the real destination ...