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 Russians Now Factor AI Answers Into Search — and Runet Sites Lost 29% of Their Visitors

A year ago, Russian searchers still treated AI answers under the bar as optional. They do not any more. Communicating agency Faves Communications told CNews on 3 November that 89% of Russian internet users now factor AI answers into how ...

Naver Ends New 750×280 Mobile Search-Home Banners From 2 December — Native 450×450 Cut-Outs and Separate Copy Take Over

Naver’s display-ads team posted a quiet but material creative change on 2 November. From Wednesday 2 December 2026, new registration and edits stop for the familiar 750×280 image banner on mobile search home (Smart Channel). On the same day, registration ...

DuckDuckGo Tells Schools They Do Not Need AI to Search the Web After Google Ties K–12 Search to Generative Features

Google’s education update on 3 November was sold as more control for schools. The small print is sharper. Access to Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Google Search will be off by default for K–12 student accounts until administrators turn them on. ...

Brave Crosses 130.77 Million Monthly Users and 2.71 Billion October Searches — While Publisher Lawsuits Target the Same Index

Brendan Eich posted Brave’s October numbers on 3 November, and they are the first clean growth print since the New York Times and Tribune papers sued the company over Ask Brave, the Search API and paywall bypass. The browser cleared ...

From 1 November Yandex Search API Runs at 10–20% Night Capacity — Pixel Tools Drops the API for Live SERP Credits

The night window for Yandex Search API is no longer a temporary patch that rank trackers can schedule around. From 1 November the same asynchronous path that we covered on 20 October is running at a fraction of prior throughput, ...

2.7 Million Yandex Sessions: Stationary Proxies Hit 76% HTTP 429s After the Data-Centre Attacks, Mobile Packs Held

If your Yandex rank tracker drew dashes across half of October while the same URLs still sat on page one when you checked by hand, you finally have numbers instead of folklore. On 29 October Andrei Kalashnikov published a vc.ru ...

New York Times and Three Tribune Papers Sue Brave Over Ask Brave, the Search API and Paywall Bypass

On 2 November The New York Times and, in a twin filing, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel sued Brave Software in the Southern District of New York. The complaints are not a generic ...

Apple Confirms Qwen in Siri, Visual Intelligence and Writing Tools for China From the 4 November Beta, and Baidu Isn’t Mentioned

Apple has now confirmed what we could only piece together from reports on 16 October. In a press release on its Chinese newsroom dated 31 October, Apple said the first Apple Intelligence features for users in China will open for ...

8-Month Test: Expert Texts Beat AI Copy in Yandex and Google, After AI Pages Briefly Took the Lead

Russian digital agency Ainet (Айnet) has published the results of an eight-month experiment, reported by CNews on 30 October. It pitted texts written by human experts against texts from five AI tools, in both Yandex and Google. The headline is ...

DeepSeek’s ¥105.5bn Round: Nearly 30 Investors Were Asked What Data They Could Bring, as Its Search API Billing Kicks In

DeepSeek’s second funding round now has a size, a valuation and most of an investor list. According to IT之家 and Sina/Kuai Keji, both citing The Information and two people familiar with the deal, DeepSeek raised ¥105.5bn from nearly 30 investors ...