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.

Alice AI Quick Answers Now Sit on ~15% of Yandex Ecommerce Queries — and the Product Cards Aren’t From Your Site

New research from Moscow agency Ashmanov & Partners tracks a fast shift in Yandex’s commercial search. In April 2026, an Alice AI answer showed up on one in a thousand ecommerce queries in its sample. By July, Alice “quick answers” ...

15 October on Naver’s SERP: Power Contents Redesign, “Super Points” Products Jump Shopping Ads, Collections Go Variable

If you buy search ads on Naver, or sell through Naver Shopping without buying ads, put Thursday 15 October in the diary. On 8 October Naver posted four advertiser notices, and every one of them changes what appears on the ...

Yandex Can’t Confirm Sasovo’s Hardware Can Be Saved — and Thursday’s Outage Hit Far More Than Yandex Cloud

Yesterday Yandex’s message about the drone strike on its Sasovo data centre was, broadly, “Search is fine, Yandex Cloud has a problem.” By Thursday evening it had changed. Yandex now says it can’t confirm the equipment can be saved, and ...

Naver Pulls the Dates on AI-Written Powerlink Ad Copy — the Opt-Out Switch Due Yesterday Never Arrived

Naver has pulled the dates for one of its more controversial search-ad changes. Its plan to show AI-generated summary text next to Powerlink ads, written by Naver’s model from the advertiser’s own landing page, was due to give advertisers an ...

Ecosia Drops Mistral for Qwen, GLM and Kimi — and Says It Halved Its AI Bill

Five months after dropping OpenAI for Mistral, Ecosia is changing AI provider again, and this time the replacement isn’t a European model. In an interview with POLITICO published on 6 October, founder and CEO Christian Kroll said the Berlin search ...

Drones Knock Out Yandex’s Biggest Data Centre — Search Says It’s Fine, Yandex Cloud’s ru-central1-b Is Not

Yandex’s data centre in Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region, was shut down overnight after a fire. Yandex says its core services, Search included, are running normally. That claim has a caveat attached, and the Yandex Cloud customers sitting in the ...

DeepSeek Lines Up $12–15 Billion From Tencent, CATL and State Funds — China’s Biggest AI Answer Engine Is Heading for the Stock Market

DeepSeek, the lab that made cheap Chinese AI a global story, is about to become one of the best-funded AI companies in China, and the money is coming mostly from the state and from industry. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday 6 ...

Yandex Open-Sources the Engine Behind Its Ad Models — Press Release Says Delay “Almost Eliminated”, Engineers Say Two Hours

Yandex has open-sourced the streaming engine that feeds its ad models, and the two announcements don’t quite agree on how fast it is. The English press release published on 6 October (Russian version here) says YTsaurus Flow handles more than ...

Open-Web SEO on Shenma When Taobao and Tmall Own the Product Pack

Here is the awkward truth international SEOs dislike: on many shopping queries, Shenma does not owe you a blue link. Alibaba’s own marketplaces are the product. Guides such as Chinafy’s and CMC’s engine overview have said the quiet part for ...

Naver Community Recap: Bloggers Say “Latest” Got Patched Again — and Naver’s Search-Abuse Fight With Toss Gets Awkward

Korean marketers spent the start of October arguing about two things. One is whether Naver quietly patched blog search again. The other is whether Naver’s own ad products are really so different from the “search abuse” it accuses Toss of. ...