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 Forum Recap: Webmaster Reopens Read-Only With Data Stuck on 6 October, Metrika Turns Up in the Android App

The big Yandex outage thread on SearchEngines.guru, “Один из ДЦ Яндекса испытал на себе плохое зло”, is now past 45 pages. Over the last two days the mood has changed from “is anything working?” to “it’s working, but what is ...

Naver Gives Web, Blog, Cafe, Knowledge iN and Video Results One Layout — and Scraps ‘Related Channels’

Naver has redesigned how its main document results look, and it’s a bigger change than it first appears. In a post on the official Naver Search blog on Thursday afternoon Korean time, the search team said that from 15 October, ...

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Apple Intelligence Approved in China: Qwen Powers the Models, Baidu Reportedly Gets Search, Siri and Visual Intelligence

Apple Intelligence is finally coming to China, and the split of who does what is the bit search marketers should care about. On Thursday in Shanghai, Apple chairman Tim Cook said Apple Intelligence and the Alibaba Qwen models behind it ...

Cloudflare: Yandex’s Outage Mostly Silenced YandexBot — and Many News Sites Were Blocking It Anyway

Cloudflare has published its own analysis of what happened to Yandex’s traffic after the data-centre strikes, and for SEOs the headline is simple: the bit that went quiet was mostly YandexBot. In its post on Wednesday, Cloudflare says that nearly ...

Naver Community Recap: Powerlink Ranks Shift by Age, a 3-Million-Page Site Vanishes From site: and Blogs Rent for 2 Million Won a Year

Korean marketers’ forum questions have moved since our last Naver community recap on 6 October. That one was about the “they patched Latest again” complaints and Naver’s fight with Toss over search abuse. In the nine days since, the threads ...

Google Took 1.19 Points Off Naver in September — and Korea’s Two Search-Share Trackers Now Disagree by More Than 20 Points

Naver lost a little ground to Google in September, according to the September search engine share report from Korean analytics firm BizSpring’s Internettrend. Naver’s share of search referrals fell from 67.40% in August to 66.75%, down 0.65 points. Google rose ...

Cốc Cốc Q3 2026 Trends: ‘iPhone 18 Price’ Outgrew ‘iPhone 18’ Fivefold and IT Job Searches Left the Big Cities

Cốc Cốc has published its Q3 2026 search trends report, and the most useful line in it for SEOs is about a modifier, not the iPhone. Searches for “giá iPhone 18” (iPhone 18 price) rose 2,802% quarter on quarter. Searches ...

151 Apps Including WeChat, Taobao, Qwen and DeepSeek Opt Out of ByteDance’s Doubao Phone Agent — China’s robots.txt for AI Agents Is Here

ByteDance’s Doubao phone assistant now has its own version of a robots.txt, and most of China’s biggest apps have already used it to say no. The 30-day public notice period for Doubao’s Screen Automation Execution Protocol (SAEP) closed on 14 ...

Naver’s AI Briefing Cites Naver Blog 46.5% of the Time — ChatGPT and Gemini Cite It Zero Times, Study Finds

Which AI engine you are optimising for in Korea now makes more difference than which keyword. A new report from Seoul consultancy 적정마케팅연구소 (Jeokjeong Marketing Lab), published on 15 October, found that Naver Blog accounted for 46.5% of the sources ...

Yandex Direct Top-Ups Return via Managers as Metrika Quietly Backfills Data — Webmaster Is Still Dark

Yandex has moved another step along its recovery list, and this time advertisers get something too. As of Wednesday evening, advertisers can top up their Yandex Direct balance again. They can’t do it in the Direct interface. They have to ...