Yandex Maps Introduces Indoor Navigation for Major Cities

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Yandex Maps has expanded its features to include indoor navigation in shopping malls, airports, and train stations across all Russian cities with populations exceeding one million. This upgrade allows users to create routes within buildings, making it easier to locate destinations and navigate efficiently.

New Indoor Navigation Features

The new navigation capability is available in 16 cities, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg. Users can now build routes to specific locations inside popular venues like malls and transport hubs.

To plan a route within a building:

  • Select the desired floor.
  • Specify the starting and ending points.

For direct navigation to gates or specific locations, users can simply find the spot on the map, hold the location, and select the “Here” button.

Integrated Citywide Routing

Yandex Maps also integrates indoor and outdoor navigation seamlessly. Users can plan routes starting from any point in the city, including directions to the best building entrance and the precise path to a specific store or facility inside. Multiple route options are available for added convenience.

To improve navigation accuracy, Yandex Maps has updated floor plans of frequently visited buildings. These updates include detailed placements of escalators, elevators, and other important facilities.

Future Expansion

The indoor navigation feature debuted in late September, and Yandex plans to continue expanding its coverage. More cities and organizations will soon be included, enhancing the service’s utility for users nationwide.

Yandex Maps remains committed to providing intuitive and detailed navigation to meet the needs of both local residents and travelers.

Source: Yandex Maps Press Release
Dan Taylor
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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.
Founder & Editor