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.

US Orders Federal Agencies to Rip Out DeepSeek — Including Third-Party Tools Built on It, Days After Its Search API Launch

The US Department of Homeland Security has published an order that bans DeepSeek from federal civilian agencies. It goes further than most of the headlines suggest. Agencies must stop buying DeepSeek products, and they must also remove “third-party products and ...

Seznam AI Now Has Hundreds of Thousands of Weekly Users — and Is Wiring In Sreality, With Mapy.com and Sauto Next

Seznam has given its first real usage figures for its chatbot. The answer is “hundreds of thousands a week”, which is modest but not nothing in a country of under 11 million people. In a blog post published on 15 ...

Kagi Translate Copies Were Outranking the Blogs They Proxied — Now They’re noindex, and Safe Search Blocks Scam Sites Outright

Kagi’s 16 October changelog is mostly the usual list of small fixes. One closed issue, though, is a lesson every SEO should know about. Feedback ticket #11490 is titled “Kagi Translate has turned my blog post into a kagi.com page ...

Alice AI and ChatGPT Named Just 9 of 30 Local Firms From Yandex’s First Pages — Maps Ratings Mattered More Than Rankings

“We’re in Yandex’s top results, so Alice recommends us too, right?” Copywriter-marketer Vyacheslav Savitsky says clients ask him this more and more. So he tested it, and published the results on vc.ru on 17 October. He took 30 local company ...

Naver Puts Shopping Search Ads Inside Smartstore Product Pages From 28 October — Right Under the Seller’s Own Info Box

Naver is taking its shopping search ads off the search results page and putting them onto sellers’ own product pages. A Naver Ads notice dated 16 October says that from Wednesday 28 October 2026, Shopping Search Ads (the shopping-mall product ...

Yandex Forum Recap: Metrika Returns With Amnesia — Ad Visits Show Up as Organic, RSYa Earnings Slide and Recrawl Stays Read-Only

Yandex Metrika is back, more or less. Over the weekend, webmasters on SearchEngines.guru found out what “more or less” means. Some saw Yandex organic traffic jump by around 30%. At the same time, their RSYa (Yandex Advertising Network) earnings fell ...

DeepSeek Opens Its In-House Search Engine to Developers at $0.75 per 1,000 Queries — With a Public ‘Authority’ Score and a GEO-Manipulation Filter

DeepSeek has opened up the search engine behind its chatbot. On Saturday 17 October the company added two raw JSON endpoints to its API, Search and Fetch, and priced each at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. The DeepSeek API changelog ...

Weekly Roundup 12–18 October 2026: Yandex’s SEO Tools Come Back Last, China Fines GEO Vendors and Naver Rebuilds Its Results

Key non-Google search stories from 12–18 October 2026: the Vladimir strike and Yandex’s slow tool recovery, Cloudflare’s YandexBot data, China’s GEO fines and Doubao opt-outs, Naver’s new results layout, Startpage’s bot problem and Cốc Cốc AI answers. ...

DeepSeek Goes Down for Nearly Five Hours, Then Refunds a Full Week of Usage as Credit

DeepSeek went down for almost five hours on Thursday, its second disruption this week. It has now done something few AI providers do: refunded a full week of usage. According to Caixin, the problems started at 8:11am Beijing time (01:11 ...

Startpage Says Bots Are Now 70% of Its Traffic — Hence the Proof-of-Work Checks and Sign-In Prompts

If Startpage has made you wait on a “Verifying your request…” screen, or asked you to sign in before showing results, it has now explained why. In a blog post on Wednesday titled “Serving Humans, Not Bots”, the private search ...