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.

Duck.ai Quietly Raises Its Age Bar to 18 and Makes Shared Chats Expire in 48 Hours

DuckDuckGo has made two quiet but telling changes to its AI chat terms. The Duck.ai Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, now marked as last updated on 1 October 2026, raise the intended age for Duck.ai from 13 to 18. ...

Naver Place Now Picks Restaurants by Weather, Hour and Occasion — Korean Local SEO Just Got Behavioural

Naver has changed how it ranks restaurants, and the new signals are what diners do, not what restaurants write. Since 1 October, local restaurant searches in parts of Korea show two new sections on Naver Place: themed recommendations (테마별 추천) ...

Yahoo Gives Scout a Homepage Button and Product Picks — the Answer Engine Is Becoming the Front Door

Yahoo is no longer treating Scout as a beta tucked away at its own URL. According to Search Engine Watch’s Sachin Patel on 5 October, Yahoo has added a dedicated Yahoo Scout button to its homepage, much like Google’s homepage ...

Shenma Ads and Brand Zone: Paid Presence When Organic Indexing Is Slow

Organic Shenma SEO has a timing problem. Mobile adaptation, China performance, and crawl trust take weeks you may not have when a campaign launches next Tuesday. That is when paid Shenma presence stops being “extra” and becomes the bridge. What ...

Someone Scraped All 295,000 Answers in Yandex’s Neuro Library — Dzen Gets Cited 2.5x More Than Wikipedia

If you want to know whom Yandex’s AI actually trusts, a Russian SEO has just done the counting for you. In a vc.ru analysis published on 4 October, Sergey Paraev says he downloaded the whole of Neurum, Yandex’s public library ...

Naver Shuts Outside AI Out of Blog, Cafe and Knowledge iN — and Says Meta’s Muse Won’t Shop There Either

Naver has made its position on outside AI very plain: you can read Korea’s biggest pile of user-generated content through Naver, and almost nowhere else. The robots.txt files on Naver Blog, Naver Cafe and Knowledge iN now open with the ...

StatCounter September 2026: Baidu Fell 12 Points in a Month and Yandex “Owns” 22% of China Mobile — Treat Panel Data Like Weather

StatCounter’s September 2026 search engine figures are out, and if you take them literally, China’s search market just had a nervous breakdown. Baidu’s all-platform share in China fell from 59.1% in August to 46.9% in September — a drop of ...