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 Puts BM25 and Vectors in One SQL Query — and Reminds Everyone Why Exact Match Still Matters

Yandex’s cloud arm has shipped something that sounds like plumbing but reads like a retrieval lesson for every SEO worrying about AI answers. On 2 October, Yandex B2B Tech announced hybrid search in its YDB database: full-text search with BM25 ...

Measuring Shenma When Analytics Calls It Direct: Logs, UC Referrers and the Webmaster Curve

Shenma disappears in three different dashboards, and teams usually conclude it therefore does not matter. StatCounter often folds it into “other”. GA4 files a chunk of UC Browser traffic as direct, because the referrer is missing or useless. Baidu’s webmaster ...

Yandex Search Launches a Free Course on Getting Cited in Alice AI Answers — With a Warning Attached

Yandex has started teaching publishers how to get into Alice’s answers — and the first lesson is not a schema trick. According to Rossiyskaya Gazeta’s report on 5 October 2026, Yandex Search and the education platform Synchronisation (“Синхронизация”) have launched ...

Cốc Cốc Vertical Search and Search Console: The Vietnam Work Google Analytics Will Not Show

Cốc Cốc’s pitch to webmasters is unfashionable and specific. The search features page says the engine builds vertical lookups for topics people in Vietnam actually search, and that a Search Console will take your sitemap and single URLs, explain robots ...

Weibo Hot Search and Search Ads: Buy the Spike, Don’t Pretend It Is SEO

Weibo’s Hot Search list is still the closest thing China has to a national argument ticker: a live top 50, seen by everyone, capable of throwing hundreds of millions of impressions at a topic in hours. Marketing China’s platform guide ...

UC Browser Is Still Shenma’s Distribution Engine — Stop Treating Them Separately

Search marketers love engine logos. Users love the app icon already on the home screen. For Shenma, that icon has long been UC Browser — the Alibaba-owned browser that co-parented Shenma in the first place. If your China report has ...

Yandex Webmaster Recap: Alice Visibility Is Still the Metric SEOs Do Not Trust

The Yandex thread that still defines the argument is not from this week. On 7 April 2026, SearchEngines.guru’s “site visibility in Alice AI” filled with webmasters who had just found the Webmaster report under Efficiency and did not like it. ...

Weekly Roundup: Baidu’s 39-Click Reality Check, Yandex Gives Alice Away and Naver Keeps Citations at Home (28 Sep – 4 Oct 2026)

The key non-Google search stories from 28 September to 4 October 2026: Baidu’s AI traffic dashboards, Yandex’s free Alice models, Naver’s in-house AI Briefing citations, DeepSeek and Qwen, Europe’s own-index push, and Shenma, Weibo and Cốc Cốc. ...

Naver Community Recap: AI Briefing Citations Are Sliding Further Inside Naver

Korean SEO publishers spent the summer arguing about a shift you can measure, not a rumour about a secret ranking factor. SEO NEWS’s 2 July 2026 source study looked at AI Briefing citations from 26 June to 2 July and ...

Shenma for B2B: Specs, Standards and Distributor Pages When You Do Not Sell on Tmall

Shenma’s reputation in English-language SEO is “the shopping engine next to Taobao”. That framing is fair for trainers and phone cases. It is a bad brief for a pump manufacturer, a chemical distributor, or a medical-device brand that will never ...