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.

89% of Claude’s Cited Pages Sit in Brave’s Top 20: What Peec’s Retrieval Tests Mean for Brave SEO

If you want to know whether Claude will cite your page, the first thing to check is Brave Search. Peec AI’s study “How to optimize content for Claude search”, by Tomek Rudzki and published on 28 October, found that 89.1% ...

DeepSeek Harness Hits 1.54 Million Daily Users and 92 Trillion Tokens a Day, With a Plugin Marketplace on the Way

DeepSeek’s agent app is growing much faster than its chatbot ever did. On Sunday the company said on X that DeepSeek Harness, its open-source agent application, reached 1.54 million daily active users on 4 November, less than three months after ...

Baidu Opens ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base Weights, but the Licence Excludes the UK, EU and South Korea

Baidu has released open weights for a new ERNIE model for the first time in 16 months, and the licence is the most interesting part for anyone reading this in London, Paris or Seoul. ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base went up on Hugging Face ...

Naver’s AI Tab Report: 23.7% of Queries Lead to Action, and Shopping and Place Click-Through Tops 40%

Naver has published its first proper look at how people use AI Tab, and the headline isn’t about knowledge questions at all. In an AI Tab service brief dated 9 November, produced with Professor Kim Kyung-oe’s team at Yonsei University, ...

Weekly Roundup 2–8 November 2026: Brave Goes to Court, Yandex’s Recovery Bill Arrives and Naver Rebuilds Its UGC and Ads

Key non-Google search stories from 2 to 8 November 2026: the NYT and Tribune lawsuits against Brave, Brave’s record usage and Rerank on Ask Brave, DuckDuckGo’s pitch to schools, Yandex’s night-only Search API and proxy data, QuestMobile’s search-to-AIGC shift, Tencent’s ...

Tencent Reportedly Prepares a Consumer AI Search Engine on the Yuanbao–Sogou Stack

Tencent is reportedly preparing a consumer-facing AI search engine that puts generated answers and web results in one minimal interface — and Chinese tech press is clear that the guts are not new. IT之家’s 3 November write-up of a Huxiu ...

Naver Powerlink ‘Phrase Generation’ Settings Open 11 November — and Shopping Ads Hit News and Main

Naver Ads spent 4–5 November lining up two more November changes that hit the results page and the surrounding inventory at once. Powerlink’s AI copy feature is back on the calendar under a new name — 문구 생성 (“phrase generation”), ...

Naver Rolls Out Experience UGC Blocks: Blog and Café Reviews Grouped by Interest From 5 November

Naver Search spent 5 November doing what Naver does best: rearranging how Blog and Café experiences show up before anyone clicks. According to a same-day write-up on i-Boss, linking the official Naver Search blog, the company is rolling out an ...

Brave Puts Rerank on Ask Brave — Users Can Boost or Hide Domains Feeding AI Answers

Two days after the New York Times and three Tribune papers sued Brave over Ask Brave, the Search API and paywall behaviour, Brave pushed a quieter product note that matters more for day-to-day SEO measurement than another lawsuit filing. On ...

QuestMobile: China’s Search Apps Lost 984 Million Hours in September as AIGC Gained Almost Exactly as Many

China’s autumn mobile-internet report landed this week, and the search line is the one non-Google SEOs should not shrug past. QuestMobile’s 2026 China Mobile Internet Autumn Report, published on 3 November and picked up by Jiemian the same day, says ...