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 remains the company’s “strategic direction” and that “in the next few weeks we will present a large-scale update of Alice AI that will significantly expand its capabilities.”
He also gave a new number. Daily active users of the Alice AI app grew 14% month on month. The statement was picked up by iXBT on 20 October, then by SEOnews and Topvisor on 21 October. “We are keeping our plans for its development and intend to accelerate the introduction of AI into products and services for users and business,” Masyuk said.
The context Yandex is talking over
The timing is the story. Between 8 and 11 October, strikes hit the Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir data centres. Alice, Search, Maps, Taxi, Mail and the advertising stack all went down. Recovery has been piecemeal. iXBT notes that most Alice AI, smart speaker and YaOS TV functions were back by 14 October. Direct regained full campaign management on 20 October. On the same day Yandex 360 restored attachments over 1 MB in Mail, document previews and Telemost cloud recording, while admitting some Disk files still won’t open.
Yandex is plainly trying to change the subject from outages to growth. It has the numbers to try. The coverage pointed back to the Mediascope figure we covered on Tuesday: 59 million people, or 48% of Russians over 12, used Alice AI in September, making it the country’s most popular AI service. Combined monthly reach for all AI services hit 55%, more than double a year earlier. Mediascope counted websites and apps only, not messenger bots and not AI answers inside search results.
What “large-scale” might mean for search
Yandex hasn’t said what’s in the update, and we won’t guess at a feature list. But Alice AI is no longer just a chat app. It’s the brand on the generative layer across Yandex Search. The quick answers under the search box run on Alice AI Search, the fine-tuned version of a 35-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that Yandex open-sourced as a pretrain in September. Yandex says more than 49 million people a month use those answers. Independent data shows how far they’ve spread. Ashmanov’s research put Alice quick answers on roughly 15% of ecommerce queries. Another study found Alice AI and ChatGPT named just 9 of 30 local firms that rank on Yandex’s first pages.
Any “significant expansion” of Alice’s capabilities is therefore likely to reach the results page too, whether through more answer coverage, more agent-style actions, or both.
Our take
Two things can be true at once. Yandex’s AI audience is genuinely growing fast, and a 14% monthly DAU jump in October is notable given that the app was partly offline for days. Yandex is also using a confident AI roadmap to reassure advertisers, investors and staff after its worst infrastructure fortnight in years.
For SEOs, the uncomfortable part is the order of priorities. The ad platform came back first and AI is getting a major update, while Webmaster’s recrawl and removal tools were still read-only at our last check and crawling is still slower than normal. If you’re waiting for Yandex to “fix organic” before you think about AI answers, you’ve misread the signals. Yandex is rebuilding around Alice, and the classic ten blue links come second.
What to do now
- Benchmark before the update lands. Record how Alice AI currently answers your top commercial and local queries, and whether it cites or names you. Repeat the check once the update ships.
- Use Webmaster’s Alice AI visibility report where it works, and keep exporting your own data. Yandex has warned that exports may be unreliable during the recovery.
- Tidy the entity signals Alice reads: Yandex Business and Maps listings, reviews, and clear, citable facts on your own pages. The local-firms study showed Maps ratings mattered more than rankings.
- Don’t over-read October data. Traffic and conversions from 8–20 October reflect an outage as much as user behaviour.
More in Yandex AI and Yandex News.