Yesterday we wrote about Alice AI phoning businesses for users, based on a Vedomosti interview about a test. A few hours later Yandex made it official, and the phone calls are only part of it. The new mode is called «Действуй!» (“Act!”). It is a general-purpose agent that runs its own cloud copy of Yandex Browser, fills in forms on your website and connects to outside services over MCP.
For SEOs, that last part matters more than the calls.
What Yandex announced
Here is what the official Yandex press release of 12 November says:
- Users no longer pick separate agents. In “Act!” mode, Alice AI splits a task into steps and picks the tools for each one itself.
- For tasks that need “several sites at once, finding information in different sections and filling in a form”, every user gets a personal cloud Yandex Browser running on a remote server. Its window is shown in the chat so the user can watch the agent at work.
- If the agent needs a logged-in account, it hands control of the page back to the user. The login is then kept for future tasks.
- Plugins are available for Yandex Music, Eda, Travel, Flowers, Smart Home and Weather, plus Aviasales and “other companies”. Users can add their own by giving a name, a description, an MCP server address and instructions.
- Early access goes to “several thousand of the most active” Alice Plus chat users, then to all subscribers on alice.yandex.ru and in the Alice AI app.
Yandex’s own engineering write-up on VC.ru goes further. The browser agent “analyses screenshots, finds the elements it needs on the page, clicks buttons and enters data”. That lets it work with sites “for which there is no ready-made connection”. Each user gets a separate virtual computer with persistent files and memory, a task scheduler and a code-execution sandbox. The browser and phone agents run on Yandex’s own models, mixed with open-weight models hosted on Yandex infrastructure. Next up is “dreaming”: the agent reviews its past work overnight and improves its own skills.
Separately, Yandex B2B Tech launched new speech models in AI Studio on 13 November, Speech TTS Live and Speech Realtime Max, so businesses can build voice agents that handle interruptions and several related tasks in one call (AdIndex/TASS). So Yandex is building agents on both ends of the phone line.
Why this is an SEO story
Classic search sent a human to your page. Alice AI answers already reduce that; Yandex says Alice answers 44% of search queries. “Act!” adds a third visitor type: a Yandex-run browser that reads your page as a screenshot and tries to finish a job on it.
Some practical consequences:
- Visual clarity is now machine usability. A screenshot-driven agent struggles with the same things people struggle with: tiny tap targets, labels hidden inside placeholders, multi-step modals and cookie walls covering the form. Booking and enquiry flows that work cleanly for a person will work better for the agent.
- Check your bot protection. The cloud browser runs on Yandex servers, not the user’s phone. If your WAF or anti-fraud rules challenge or block datacentre traffic, you may be turning away a real customer’s agent. Log it, look at it, and decide on purpose instead of letting a default rule decide.
- MCP is the new “integration”. Yandex’s own services and Aviasales get first-party plugins. Everyone else can either be screen-scraped by the browser agent or publish an MCP server that users can plug in. For ecommerce, travel and services brands with an API, an MCP endpoint is quickly becoming the agent-era version of a product feed.
- Your Yandex Business card still matters. The phone agent and the browser agent both start from what Yandex already knows about you. If your hours, prices and booking link disagree between your site and your card, the agent will show that mismatch to the customer.
My take
This is Yandex’s answer to OpenAI’s agent mode and Naver’s promised agent app, and in one respect it goes further: it pairs browser automation with real phone calls under one subscription in a market where Yandex already controls search, maps, taxis, food delivery and the browser. The early-access cohort is tiny, so don’t expect agent visits in your logs next week. The direction is clear, though. In Russia, “ranking” will gradually come to mean “the agent could complete the task with you”. Sites built as conversion funnels for humans will need to be usable by machines too.
