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.

Alibaba’s “Qwen Go!” Agent Haggles Over Flight Refunds and Works Taobao Price Protection — Your Website Isn’t in the Loop

Alibaba has put a date-free waitlist in front of its most ambitious consumer AI product yet. On 13 October the Qwen app’s official account said a sign-up page for “Qwen Go!” (千问Go!) was now live. It’s a personal agent built ...

Yandex Gets Pay Back Before Webmaster, Metrika and Direct — and Advertisers Still Can’t Pause a Campaign

Yandex has started bringing services back after Sunday’s strike on its Vladimir data centre, and the order tells you who comes first. At 06:50 UK time this morning Yandex’s fintech chief said Yandex Pay was “gradually returning”. Consumer services such ...

Cốc Cốc Shows AI Answers on 80% Informational Searches, but Just 6% of Commercial Ones

In a 100-query test on 12 October 2026, Cốc Cốc showed an AI answer feature on 43 results pages: 40 of 50 informational queries but only 3 of 50 commercial ones. Most were instant answers with citation chips. ...

Naver Hands the Mobile Shopping Tab’s “Trend Pick” Block to ADVoost From Today — Logged-Out Users Get Super Points Promos

From today, Monday 12 October, one of the most visible ad blocks in Korean ecommerce changes hands. According to a Naver advertiser-centre notice, the guaranteed (보장형) “Trend Pick” ads in the Shopping tab of Naver’s mobile homepage are ending. The ...

Yandex Forum Recap: YandexBot Goes Quiet, Neuro Answers Thin Out and Direct Can’t Be Paused After the Vladimir Strike

The SearchEngines.guru thread that began with the Sasovo fire passed 230 posts over the weekend. When the Vladimir data centre went down overnight into Sunday, it stopped being mainly about servers and became a running log of what Russian webmasters ...

China Has Now Fined Three GEO Vendors for Gaming AI Answers — and One Case Calls It Harm to the AI Itself

China’s market regulators are now treating “GEO” (generative engine optimisation) as an enforcement area. On 10 October the 21st Century Business Herald counted three administrative penalties against GEO vendors this year, and the latest one goes further than “you lied ...

A Third Yandex Data Centre Goes Dark: Vladimir Strike Knocks Out Metrika, Webmaster and the Direct Interface

Three data centres in four days. Overnight on 10–11 October drones hit Yandex’s site in Vladimir, and this time the damage reached the tools SEOs and advertisers use every day. Yandex Metrika and Yandex Webmaster went blank, the Direct interface ...

Weekly Roundup: Drones Hit Yandex’s Biggest Data Centre, Alice Takes Ecommerce SERPs and Naver Locks Out Outside AI

Last week the biggest story in non-Google search was not a product launch. It was a data centre on fire. Drones hit Yandex’s Sasovo facility, Cloud went dark across a chunk of the RuNet, and Search insisted it was fine ...

Duck.ai Chat Sharing Is Live — and Every Share Page Ships With a Noindex

DuckDuckGo has launched chat sharing in Duck.ai, and the technical choices behind it are worth a look for anyone who still remembers ChatGPT conversations turning up in Google. Every Duck.ai share page tells search engines not to index it, both ...

Yahoo Tests a Search Box Under Its AI Overview That Sends Searchers Straight Into Scout

Yahoo is testing another way to move people out of its classic results and into Yahoo Scout. This time the hook is a search box placed directly under the AI overview on a normal Yahoo results page. Type into it ...