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 Webmaster Restores the API, Recrawl Speed, Security Section and Metrika Binding, but New Sites and Recrawl Requests Are Not on the List

Yandex Webmaster has published its second recovery update since the October data-centre attacks. In a blog post on 29 October, picked up by SEOnews, the team listed another batch of tools that are “back in working mode”. It also said ...

Naver Community Recap: Integrated Search Shake-Up From 29 October Night, Fresh Posts Rank Instantly and Brand Websites Go Missing

From late on 29 October, threads started piling up about Naver integrated search (통합검색, or “통검”). The reports say brand-new blog and café posts are jumping straight to the top, content that held top positions has dropped or disappeared, and ...

Baidu Cuts Its Search AI API to ¥4.9 per 1,000 Calls, Undercutting DeepSeek, as the Baidu App Claims “Recursive Self-Evolution”

On 27 October we wrote that Baidu was holding its Search API at ¥36 per 1,000 calls while everyone else in China’s agent-search market cut prices. It has now stopped holding. At a Baidu App product upgrade briefing in Beijing ...

Weekly Roundup 26 October – 1 November 2026: China’s Search-API Price War, Alice AI Answers 44% of Yandex Queries and Naver Makes Room for More Ads

Key non-Google search stories from 26 October to 1 November 2026: Baidu’s search API price cut and DeepSeek’s billing switch-on, Brave’s pay-per-search agents, Sogou’s AI homepage, Alice AI at 44% of Yandex queries, Yandex’s indexing hangover, Naver’s ad tests and ...

Brave bx402: Pay-Per-Search for AI Agents at $0.005 a Query in Stablecoins, No API Key, and Now Its Own Payment Facilitator

Brave already sells search to machines through the Brave Search API, at $5 per 1,000 requests with an account and an API key. Its public GitHub shows it building the next step: search that an AI agent can buy one ...

Naver Tests Up to Nine Place Ads in Mobile Search From 5 November, Plus Bigger Favicons and Two-Line Site Names on Powerlink

Naver posted two ad tests this morning. Both run from Thursday 5 November, both affect the results page directly, and one of them takes organic space from local businesses. Up to nine Place ads in mobile search The first notice, ...

Chinese Advertisers Spent More Than ₽10bn on Yandex in Nine Months: 2.4x Last Year, Ecommerce Up Ninefold, Travel 7.6x

Chinese companies have more than doubled their spending on Yandex advertising this year. According to figures Yandex gave Sostav, advertisers from China spent 2.4 times as much with Yandex in January to September 2026 as in the same period last ...

Yandex Q3 2026: Alice AI Now Answers 44% of Search Queries, and Yandex Withdraws 2026 Guidance After the Data-Centre Attacks

Yandex published its third-quarter 2026 results this morning, and the number that matters most for anyone doing search in Russia is not revenue. It is this: Alice AI now gives an answer in Yandex Search for 44% of queries. The ...

Naver Ads Before N Ads: New Terms From 4 November, a Third Mobile Shopping Collection Test and Liquor Ad Warnings From 9 November

Naver’s ad notice board has been busy in the run-up to the N Ads rebrand on 4 November. Four notices posted or updated this week are worth a look for anyone running Korean search or shopping campaigns. One is about ...

Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and 360 Sign Beijing Marketing Pact: AI Labels, No Fake Endorsements, Cited Sources Must Be Named

Beijing’s market regulator has got eight of China’s biggest ad platforms to sign a self-regulation pact on online marketing. IT之家 reports, citing the Beijing Administration for Market Regulation, that Baidu, Ocean Engine (ByteDance’s ad platform), Tencent, Kuaishou, JD, Meituan, 360 ...