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.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Beats Qwen3.8 Flash on Speed — If You Kill Thinking Mode

Independent timing finally put a number on the Flash war. On 23 September 2026, MRKT30 ran 320 streamed API calls from Budapest comparing DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Qwen3.8 Flash through OpenRouter, pinned to each lab’s own endpoint with fallbacks off. ...

Baidu AI Traffic Analysis Reality Check: One Site Logged 1M Citations and 39 Clicks

Baidu’s new AI Traffic Analysis panel finally has practitioner numbers ugly enough to be useful. A Chinese case write-up on Xingyun / 助君数智营销 (23 September 2026) walks through one well-known brand site’s Search Resource Platform screenshots: in a recent-30-day view, ...

Yandex Unlocks Flagship Alice Chat Models for Free — With Live Search Citations

Yandex has done the thing every CIS SEO should have on a calendar alert: it unlocked the previously gated flagship Alice chat models for free. An English write-up syndicated via AKM (dated 1 October 2026 on that wire, describing the ...

Naver Whale Launches AI Chat as the Browser Turns Agent

Naver just turned Whale from “another Chromium skin” into an explicit AI browser. On 1 October 2026 — Whale’s tenth anniversary — Naver said it had officially launched AI Chat in the sidebar, with a rebranded logo and the slogan ...

DeepSeek Open-Sources Ascend Tools With Huawei to Challenge CUDA

DeepSeek just moved the China AI story from model cards to the substrate that actually decides who can train at scale. On 30 September 2026 the Hangzhou lab said via its official WeChat account that it had open-sourced a suite ...

Yandex Search Forum Recap: Expert Mode, Alice SoV, and Citation Overlap Angst

Here is the Yandex-side conversation worth tracking this week — product posts plus Russian webmaster discourse, not Google Twitter. Product Alice AI’s Expert mode and automatic model routing (15–16 September) is the fresh architecture story. Yandex says ~80% of requests ...

Baidu's visibility on Sistrix

Audit: Baidu’s Chinese AI Overviews Are Far More Source-Concentrated Than Google’s

If you sell “get cited in Baidu AI answers,” start with the concentration math. A Politecnico di Milano audit on arXiv — Auditing Source Exposure in Baidu and Google AI Search — compared Baidu and Google AI overviews across 500 ...

Baidu-Linked Research: AI Search Should Rank Evidence Fitness, Not Just Relevance

A Baidu-affiliated research group just spelled out why classic SEO scorecards misfire on generative answers. The preprint From Ranked Documents to Reliable Contexts (authors include Baidu Inc. researchers, with Yinqiong Cai as corresponding author, plus Chinese Academy of Sciences / ...

Kagi Walks Back Translate Paywall After Freemium Backlash

Kagi spent September teaching every SaaS founder the same lesson the hard way: three pricing changes in a quarter is how you set your own community on fire. On 28 September 2026 the company updated its Translate announcement with a ...

DeepSeek’s DSec Sandboxes Train Agents at 380,000 Concurrent — and Warn They Can’t Be Trusted

DeepSeek just published the boring part of agent AI that actually moves product quality: the sandbox farm. An arXiv paper on DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec) — covered by TechNode and Seoul Economic Daily — describes a unified platform for function-call, ...