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 off a cliff. Direct reported ten clicks, and Metrika could find one of them. The explanation is in a Metrika help page, and it isn’t an SEO win.
Metrika forgot every visit before 11 October
Metrika’s “special mode” help page spells it out. From 11 October 2026, “visitor visit history is being counted afresh”. Several attribution models depend on earlier visits: Last significant click, First click, Last click from Yandex Direct, Automatic, and their cross-device versions. Those models now “see only visits after this date”. As a result, Yandex says “some visits and conversions from advertising may temporarily be shown as clicks from search engines, direct entries or internal clicks”. The share of ad sources will be lower than usual until new history builds up. Only plain Last click is unaffected. The page also warns that the share of new visitors may be inflated for any period from 11 October.
The same page lists what still only works in part: the Behaviour reports (including Webvisor), offline conversions, benchmarks, content analytics, monetisation reports, Geography/Gender/Age/Long-term interests, the informer and counter-list stats. The Logs API is back. Data from 11 October is still being processed, though, and Yandex says to re-download those days once processing finishes.
That explains much of what people posted in the long-running outage thread:
- One webmaster said Metrika showed Yandex traffic up 30%, while RSYa income had fallen “almost five times”. Another said his RSYa revenue was down about 40% and “falling every day”.
- On page 47, one member wrote that “part of organic is being written into direct”. Another asked whether everyone’s Metrika was counting new visits correctly.
- One advertiser saw 10 clicks in Direct for the previous day and 1 visit in Metrika.
- Bidding tools are working again now that the Direct API is back. One user said it is capped at one request every 10 seconds.
- One user relaunched Direct campaigns. They said the whole daily budget went overnight and cost per conversion rose six-fold on some campaigns. Others warned that touching campaigns triggers retraining.
- Advertisers said spam-bot pressure fell about threefold while the data centres were down and came back as soon as Direct did. On page 49, others said traffic had dropped while their positions hadn’t moved.
Webmaster is officially back, partly
On the Webmaster side, Yandex has now confirmed what members were seeing when we wrote the last recap on Friday. The Webmaster blog posted on 16 October at 17:12 Moscow time. It says six tools work in full: robots.txt analysis, the page indexing check, sitemap analysis, the structured data validator, the IP check and the XML validator. Several sections are view-only: reviews and rating in search, feeds and errors, billing, page recrawl and page removal. Everything else may be delayed “because of slow crawling by the robot”, and report exports may be unavailable. AdIndex reported the same day that Metrika, AppMetrica, Yandex Business and the Direct API were back in basic form. It also said Metrika data for 11–13 October had been kept.
Our take
If your weekly report shows Yandex organic up 30% since the strikes, don’t send it to the client yet. Reports that use any history-based attribution model will move paid visits into organic and direct until the new history builds up. Here is what we’d do this week:
- Switch comparison reports to Last click for anything from 11 October onwards, and annotate that date in every dashboard.
- Check organic numbers against Webmaster’s own search query data once it catches up. Remember it was stuck on 6 October last week.
- Re-download Logs API exports for 11 October onwards after Yandex says processing is complete.
- Use server logs rather than Metrika for crawl questions. Cloudflare’s data showed how quiet YandexBot went, and recrawl is still view-only.
The RSYa revenue drop is real money and Metrika can’t explain it. Several publishers say it is still falling day by day. That fits the wider picture of an ad stack that came back in pieces, but none of the members has an answer from Yandex yet. We’ll keep watching the thread.