The SearchEngines.guru thread that began with the Sasovo fire passed 230 posts over the weekend. When the Vladimir data centre went down overnight into Sunday, it stopped being mainly about servers and became a running log of what Russian webmasters were seeing in Yandex search, crawling and ads. Here are the observations worth keeping, with the usual caveat: these are forum reports, not Yandex statements, and several of them disagree.
1. YandexBot apparently went quiet
Early on Sunday, one regular wrote that Search was “still working somehow, but there’s no fast bot” (быстробот, the crawler that gets fresh pages into Yandex within minutes). Later that day another member said Cloudflare’s statistics showed Yandex’s bots had “almost stopped indexing”, and a third replied that the bot had “completely switched off” since the night of the attack. Nobody posted the underlying data, and Yandex hasn’t commented on crawling.
This one is easy to check. Look at your own server logs for verified YandexBot hits from 11 October onwards, then compare them with the same days a week earlier. If crawling has fallen, newly published and updated pages will reach Yandex’s index more slowly, so don’t read a lag over the next few days as a quality problem.
2. Neuro answers thinned out, and some clicks came back
On Sunday evening one member said Yandex traffic had gone up, “on average more” than usual. A reply suggested Alice had dropped out and there were fewer ready-made answers in the results. On Monday morning another poster added that the neuro-answers in the SERP had been dropping out: “for some time during the day there were none at all, and otherwise they appeared less often than usual.”
If that holds up, it’s an unplanned test of something we’ve been tracking for weeks: how many clicks Alice’s answers take from organic results. Earlier this month we covered Ashmanov & Partners’ finding that Alice quick answers now sit on roughly 15% of ecommerce queries. If you have clean data by query class for 11 October, compare it with the previous Sunday. This may be the closest thing to a “no AI answers” control group Yandex SEOs will get.
3. The captcha got harder
The same posters reported far more captchas on Yandex search. One agency owner called it “the most hellish I’ve ever seen”. He guessed Yandex was protecting Direct from click fraud, and later pointed out that anti-fraud systems eat exactly the compute Yandex is now short of. That’s speculation, but it matters for anyone running rank trackers or SERP scrapers. The same poster said his position-tracking had been slow for two or three days and then stopped working altogether.
4. Behavioural-factor manipulation stopped working
The most revealing exchange for Yandex SEO came from the behavioural-factor (ПФ) manipulation crowd. One member said PF manipulation “seems to have stopped after the first bombing” and that sites had settled into their positions and stayed there. Asked to confirm, he said he had switched off all his manipulation “a couple of days ago”, his sites were holding steady, and when he tried running it again on two sites, nothing changed.
I won’t make much of a single anecdote. But if behavioural signals stopped being processed while rankings stayed put, it suggests the ranking layer is running on cached or frozen inputs for now. That’s another reason not to make big on-site changes this week and then credit the result to your edits.
5. Direct kept spending, but advertisers couldn’t get in
The loudest complaint was about control rather than traffic. “You can’t get into the advertiser account. You can’t switch it on or off, or pause it. Metrika doesn’t work either,” one agency owner wrote. Others said RSYa ads were still showing on their sites while the partner dashboard wouldn’t open. By Monday morning the reports were mixed: one member said RSYa ads had disappeared on desktop but still showed on mobile, and another said ad posts in Telegram and Max channels had stopped.
6. Mood check
The thread swings between gallows humour (“SEO is Google-only now?”) and firm “it’ll all be back in a day or two” posts. One member who said everything was working was asked straight back whether Metrika and Direct were working for him. He said he didn’t use them. That exchange sums up the weekend fairly well: consumer services came back first, and the tools webmasters depend on were further down the list.
What to take from it
- Check crawling in your logs before you trust any visibility report for 8–12 October.
- Store the 11 October organic click data separately. It may be your only near-“no Alice” baseline.
- Freeze major on-page experiments until Webmaster and Metrika are back, because you won’t be able to measure them properly.
For what the community was arguing about before all this, see our last Yandex Webmaster recap on Alice visibility. More recaps are in Roundup.