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.

Swisscows’ Family Filter Is a Ranking System — Adult, Violent and UGC Pages Need Not Apply

Swisscows does not offer SafeSearch as a toggle you might forget. The filter is the product. The company’s own explanation of how its search works says pornographic and sexual content is not shown, and the 2026 surveillance statement adds that ...

Cốc Cốc’s Ask AI Sidebar Answers the Page You Were About to Read

On 9 April 2026 Cốc Cốc shipped Hỏi AI — Ask AI — a browser sidebar that summarises, explains, rewrites, or quizzes the page you already have open. The official blog post is plain about the defaults: ChatGPT answers unless ...

Weibo SEO for International Brands: Posts, Hashtags and the Baidu Side Door

Weibo does not have a Search Console you can brief like Baidu’s. Visibility is still a craft: what the post says, which hashtag it joins, whether the account is verified, and whether Baidu bothers to index the URL afterwards. Marketing ...

Baidu Webmaster Recap: AI Traffic Dashboards Are Live — and a Lot of Them Are Still Empty

Baidu’s Search Resource Platform has had AI Traffic Analysis on the menu since the 15 September 2026 announcement. The official line has not quietly changed: the feature is opening in phases, the data service was not fully switched on at ...

Quark Took the AI Spotlight — Where Does That Leave Shenma in Alibaba’s Search Stack?

Alibaba’s loudest search story in 2025–2026 is not Shenma. It is Quark. On 13 March 2025 Alibaba said it had rebuilt Quark into a Qwen-powered AI “super assistant” for more than 200 million users in China — chatbot, deep thinking, ...

Swisscows Drew a Line in 2026: Anonymous Search Is Now a Paid Product

Swisscows spent years selling a simple promise: anonymous search, no user profiles, family-safe results, ads that do not follow you around the web. In 2026 the company admitted the free product can no longer keep that promise in full. Its ...

Cốc Cốc’s Q2 2026 Search Trends: Jobs Surged, and AI Queries Ate the Tech Category

Cốc Cốc published its Q2 2026 search trend round-up and it is more useful than another market-share pie. Across eight main themes, query volume on Cốc Cốc rose 5.9% versus Q1. Technology and entertainment stayed the largest buckets. The fastest ...

Weibo Search Is a Discovery Engine — Stop Briefing It Like a Small Baidu

International China decks still file Weibo under “social, not search”. That was lazy in 2018 and it is wrong in 2026. Weibo has its own query box, a Discover surface, Hot Search, and an AI search layer — 智搜 (Zhiso) ...

YisouSpider and the Robots.txt Trap: Why Shenma Never Crawls Half of International Sites

Most “we tried Shenma and nothing happened” post-mortems are not ranking mysteries. They are crawl-access mistakes. Shenma’s spider is YisouSpider (you will also see it logged as yisouspider). If your robots.txt allow-lists Baiduspider and Googlebot and then Disallow: / for ...

Shenma vs Baidu: Why China’s Smaller Mobile Engine Still Matters for Commerce

Every China SEO deck opens with Baidu share. Fair enough: StatCounter’s September 2026 mobile cut still has Baidu around 60%, with Yandex, Bing, Haosou and Sogou fighting over the rest. Shenma barely registers on some public charts. So why write ...