Yandex Has Expanded the List of Business Categories To Receive the “Good Place” Award

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Yandex has significantly expanded the scope of the award, including almost 30 new business categories in its recognition program.

Every year, Yandex acknowledges the best establishments based on user reviews and ratings on its platform.

The selection process for the 2023 “Good Place” award will begin at the end of January, with winners announced and celebrated in early February. Recipients of the award will be distinguished with a special mark on their company profiles in Yandex Maps, along with a sticker for display on their premises.

This expansion in the award’s scope marks a significant development for the program.

Yandex aims to encompass a broader range of businesses, recognizing excellence across various sectors. The comprehensive list of newly included business categories is available for public view, offering insights into the diverse types of establishments now eligible for the award.

In addition to the recognition, Yandex has previously offered tangible benefits to award winners. In September, for instance, Yandex rewarded all “Good Place” award recipients with a 15% discount on Priority placement in Maps. This incentive not only acknowledges the high-quality services provided by these businesses but also enhances their visibility and customer reach.

Yandex’s “Good Place” award underscores the company’s commitment to promoting service excellence and customer satisfaction.

By expanding the award categories, Yandex is not only celebrating a wider array of businesses but also encouraging an elevated standard of service across various industries. This initiative reflects Yandex’s role as a key player in the digital sphere, continuously innovating and supporting business growth and recognition.

 

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