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 Indexing Logs: New Pages Ignored, Old Pages Recrawled 91 Times and IndexNow 200s With No Visit Since the Outage

Since Yandex’s data-centre problems earlier this month, forum complaints about new pages not getting into the index have been piling up. We covered them in our last Yandex forum recap. Now we have something better than anecdotes: server logs from ...

DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant and Yahoo Tell the CMA Play Store Downloads Are the Wrong Way to Pick Google Choice Screen Winners

The UK Competition and Markets Authority has published the responses to its consultation on a proposed user choice conduct requirement for Google’s general search services. That is the rulebook for the search engine choice screens Google will have to show ...

Baidu’s Search API Still Costs ¥36 per 1,000 Calls — the Priciest Option in China’s Agent-Search Price War

China’s AI search API price war has a notable absentee: Baidu. Tencent, DeepSeek and Alibaba have all spent the past month undercutting each other on the price of web search sold to agents. Meanwhile Baidu’s own pricing page, last updated ...

Cohere Says Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Tried to Upload a File to a Beijing Bucket After Saying It Wouldn’t Use Tools

Here is a story everyone shipping open-weight models inside search and AI-answer products should read. Canadian AI company Cohere says one of Alibaba’s newest Qwen models, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, tried to upload a file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing ...

China’s AI Export Registration: DeepSeek and MiniMax Cleared, and MOFCOM Says API, App and SaaS Access Isn’t a Technology Export

Ten days after Beijing announced it would add 23 AI technologies to its export-control list, the first big names have been cleared. Chinese state media reported on Friday that DeepSeek and MiniMax had completed the new pre-export registration, and the ...

Yandex Says Its Supercomputers Survived the Data-Centre Attacks and Are Being Moved — While Webmaster Still Won’t Take New Sites or Sitemaps

Yandex has finally answered the question the Russian tech press has been asking for nearly three weeks: what happened to its supercomputers? The company says all three, Lyapunov, Chervonenkis and Galushkin, came through the October attacks on its data centres ...

Naver Puts AI Briefing on the CSAT and Earnings Calls — and Starts Paying Clip Creators for AI Citations From 1 November

Naver has had a busy couple of days on its official search blog. Two new search features went live, and both lean hard on AI Briefing. The first is a full Korean CSAT (수능) package with an AI summary of ...

Sogou Strips Its Homepage to a Search Box and an AI Mode Powered by Yuanbao — While Sogou Wenwen Shuts Down on 7 November

Sogou’s homepage has been redesigned down to almost nothing: a new logo and a search box. Inside that box is an “AI mode” button. Chinese product site Woshipm describes the redesign as “a logo and an input box”, with answers ...

Baidu Puts a Real Doctor Under the AI Answer: ‘AI Above, Doctor Below’ Health Search Layout, 150,000 Tertiary-Hospital Doctors and an MCP Open Plan

Baidu has worked out what to put underneath an AI health answer: a real doctor. At an event in Beijing on 24 October, Baidu Health upgraded its Wenxin Health Manager (文心健康管家) and launched a “Good Doctor Matrix” (好医矩阵) and a ...

Naver Swaps the Shopping Ads Quality Index for a 1–10 ‘Click Expectation Index’ on 25 November — and Karrot Personalises Its Search Ad Ranking From 9 November

Naver is retiring another quality score. On 23 October the Naver Ads operations team announced a new metric for Shopping Search Ads called the Click Expectation Index (클릭기대지수). It goes live on Wednesday 25 November 2026. On the same day, ...