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 Says Advertisers Didn’t Leave After the Data-Centre Attacks — Yandex Business Is Back, Audiences Are Read-Only and Cloud Has Recovered 90.47% of Data

Yandex’s commercial director has said the thing advertisers were waiting to hear. After two weeks of data-centre damage, the money didn’t leave. Speaking at the Group4Media conference on 23 October, Gleb Dobrorodnykh said advertiser activity on new campaign launches is ...

Weekly Roundup 19–25 October 2026: DeepSeek and Tencent Sell Search to Machines, Yandex Counts the Damage and Naver Rebuilds Its Ad Stack

Key non-Google search stories from 19–25 October 2026: DeepSeek and Tencent search APIs, the US DeepSeek removal order, one-click ad hiding in China, Yandex’s Metrika and indexing hangover, Alice AI’s reach, and Naver’s Related Questions, Place and N Ads changes. ...

A Beginner’s Guide to Qwen and Qwen Agents

What Qwen is, how the models, app, API and Qwen-Agent framework differ, open-weight licensing, function calling, retrieval versus training, and realistic SEO uses, as of 25 October 2026. ...

DeepSeek Closes a ¥100bn ($15bn) Round Led by CATL and Tencent at a ~$74bn Valuation as a Shanghai IPO Comes Into View

DeepSeek has closed one of the largest private funding rounds in Chinese history. Bloomberg, via The Business Times, reports the Hangzhou-based company raised about 100 billion yuan (US$15 billion), citing people familiar with the matter. Battery maker CATL and Tencent ...

Yandex Forum Recap: Fresh Pages Stuck Outside the Index for Days, Recrawl Still Blocked, IndexNow as the Workaround and More Metrika Gaps

Two weeks after the data-centre incident that took Yandex Webmaster offline, Russian SEO forums have moved on from outage reports to a slower, more frustrating problem: new pages are not getting into the Yandex index, or are getting there days ...

Bing China Joins Baidu and Sogou in Letting Users Hide Search Ads With One Click — 360 Is the Last Holdout

The major Chinese web search engines are starting to let users hide paid results with one click. A report from 新品牌BrandPaper, syndicated on Tencent News, says the Chinese web version of Microsoft Bing now offers one-click hiding of first-screen search ...

Naver Search Now Answers University Admissions in the SERP — Places, Competition Ratios, Converted Scores and an AI Briefing on Recommended Subjects

Naver has added a structured university admissions experience to integrated search, timed for the point in the Korean academic year when it matters most. In a post on the official Naver Search blog on 23 October, the company says applicants ...

Naver Tests a New Restaurant Place Listing From 29 October — Badges for Reservation Surges and Revisits That Ads Can’t Buy, Plus 6,066 New Power Contents Keywords

Naver is changing how restaurant results look in mobile integrated search, and it is telling advertisers before it tells anyone else. A notice on the Naver Ads centre published on 22 October confirms a test of a redesigned Place listing ...

How Asia’s Search Engines Built Their Own AI Answers: Dan Taylor’s Asia SEO Summit Talk Previewed

Dan Taylor, Partner at SALT.agency and founder of International Search Insights (ISI), is speaking at the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026 on 23 October 2026. His talk, “How Asia’s Search Engines Built Their Own AI Answers: Being chosen, and accurate, ...

Weibo Rebuilds Hot Search Around Events and Viewpoints — Older Posts Without the Hashtag Can Now Surface, and an AI ‘Chief Editor’ Is in Testing

Weibo is rebuilding its hot search landing pages, and the change rewards substance over speed. At the 2026 Weibo V Influence Conference in Beijing on 17 October, Zhou Zihui, Weibo’s senior director of hot-topic operations, said the landing page behind ...