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 Promises a ‘Large-Scale’ Alice AI Update Within Weeks — App DAU Up 14% as It Talks Past the Data Centre Outage

Two weeks after drones knocked out three of its data centres, Yandex is promising its AI assistant a big upgrade, not a slower roadmap. Dmitry Masyuk, who heads Yandex’s search services and AI business group, told RBC that artificial intelligence ...

Naver’s Ad Centre Becomes ‘N Ads’ on 4 November — With One-Tap AI Recommendations, a ‘Why Isn’t My Ad Showing?’ Bot and Prompt-Built Audiences

Naver’s advertiser centre is getting a new name and a new job description. In a notice published on 22 October, Naver said that from Wednesday 4 November the 네이버 광고주센터 (Naver Advertiser Centre) becomes 네이버애즈 (N Ads). The URL stays ...

Naver Community Recap: Blog Tab Top Spots Reshuffle From Friday, Cafe Posts Drop Out of ‘Relevance’ and Websites Pile Into Integrated Search

Something moved on Naver at the end of last week, and Korea’s marketers noticed before Naver said anything. Since our last community recap on 15 October, the i-boss boards have filled up with the same complaint in different forms. Blog-tab ...

Yandex Direct Is Fully Editable Again After Nine Days — Webmaster’s Recrawl and Removal Tools Are Still Read-Only

Yandex Direct is properly open for business again. On 20 October, Yandex said on its official channel that the key Direct tools were back. Advertisers can create and edit campaigns of any type, launch, stop and archive them, register new ...

DeepSeek Open-Sources DeepInfer, the Engine That Serves Its Answers — Deterministic Output, Huawei Ascend Support and Some Missing Parts

DeepSeek has open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference framework that serves its production models. This is the layer between the model weights and the API, and it decides how much each answer costs. The code is on GitHub under Apache 2.0, alongside ...

Tencent Opens Yuanbao Search to Developers at ¥14 per 1,000 Calls — Built on Sogou, Priced Against DeepSeek, and Made for Agents

Tencent has opened Yuanbao Search to outside developers. It’s the search engine behind its Yuanbao AI assistant, and it’s now sold through Tencent Cloud as an API, an MCP server and an agent “Skill”. Prices start at ¥14 per 1,000 ...

China Put RMB250 Billion Into AI in H1 2026, Mostly Into Robots. The US Put $217 Billion Into Two Model Labs

China’s official internet statistics body has put a number on Chinese AI investment in H1 2026, and next to the US figures the gap is roughly tenfold. For search people, the bigger story is where the money went. In China ...

Yandex Search API Is Back on the Night Shift: Async Checks Only From Midnight to 6am Moscow Time, and Rank Trackers Are Rescheduling

If your Yandex rank tracking has been blank since the data-centre strikes, there’s partial good news. The official Yandex Search API is running again, but its asynchronous (deferred) mode only works from 00:00 to 06:00 Moscow time. Rank trackers are ...

Alice AI Reached 48% of Russians in September — Four Times DeepSeek, and Mediascope Didn’t Even Count Search Answers

Here’s a number every Yandex-market SEO should keep handy: 59 million people in Russia, 48% of everyone aged 12 and over, used Alice AI in September. That comes from new Mediascope data on AI services. DeepSeek came second with 13 ...

Naver Pulls ‘Related Questions’ Out of AI Briefing From 22 October — Answers Expand Inline, Even Where No Briefing Shows

Naver is moving its “Related Questions” (관련질문) feature out of AI Briefing and making it a standalone block in the main search results, starting Thursday 22 October. Clicking a suggested question now opens the answer inline, so there is no ...