Yandex March 2025 Update

Yandex has rolled out new search algorithm updates to promote high-quality content. According to a recent company statement, these changes are designed to reduce the visibility of low-quality sources in search results.

The updates have already shown results. The number of poor-quality sites appearing on the first page of search results has dropped significantly.

One of the key improvements is Yandex’s ability to identify low-quality documents, including those generated by AI. The company now claims a 99% accuracy rate in detecting such content.

Yandex expanded the range of ranking signals used in its algorithms. The updates were made after collecting feedback from users, SEO specialists, marketers, and business owners.

The need for change comes as the internet becomes flooded with automatically generated or keyword-stuffed content that adds little value for users. Yandex noted that some pages might include the correct terms to match a search but still fail to deliver meaningful information.

Websites that attempt to manipulate search results by posting low-quality or deceptive content have been pushed down in rankings due to the update.

Yandex plans to improve its search technologies in the coming months to deliver better results and meet rising user expectations.

This update follows a similar move by Google, which completed its March 2025 Core Update to improve search quality.

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.