Russian search engines: Yandex and its market share

Yandex leads Russian search, and Google is a distant second

The most used search engine in Russia is Yandex, not Google. As of September 2026, StatCounter Global Stats credited Yandex with 70.33% of Russian search referrals against 28.12% for Google. Yandex's own measurement tool, Yandex Radar, put the company at 68.0% of the Russian search market for the third quarter of 2025, and 65.9% on mobile.

Russia is one of only two large markets where Google is not first; China is the other. Unlike in China, Google never left Russian search, and it still holds more than a quarter of referrals. Yandex leads because it built the first search engine to handle Russian well, because it kept its own crawler and index (the engine's stored copy of the web, built by its own software) when its domestic rivals gave theirs up, and because the Russian competition regulator broke Google's hold on Android search defaults between 2015 and 2017.

Two measures appear throughout: StatCounter, an independent tracker counting referrals (visits from a results page to sites carrying its code), and Yandex Radar, the company's own tool. Each figure carries its source and date; the two are never averaged.

The Russian search engines, and whose index each one uses

Russia has more search brands than search indexes, so a Russian name on a search box does not mean a Russian engine ranked the results.

Yandex

Yandex search launched at yandex.ru on 23 September 1997. Its founders, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, had worked on Russian morphological search (matching the many inflected forms one Russian word takes) since 1990. IPJSC Yandex reported 47.3 million logged-in users of its Alice neural network across Search, Chat and its app in September 2025.

Mail.ru and VK

Mail.ru search used Google's results until the summer of 2013, when it completed a move to its own engine. Mail.ru Group was renamed VK in October 2021. Which engine VK's search runs on today could not be confirmed for this page; at 0.46% on StatCounter in September 2026, the answer carries little weight for share.

Rambler

Rambler launched in 1996, a year before Yandex, and retired its own crawler and index in 2011; Yandex's press release of 23 June 2011 announced that Rambler's search would be powered by Yandex. Rambler is now a news and mail portal owned by Sber, the state-controlled bank. Its search box is a front end onto Yandex, not an alternative.

Why Yandex won its home market

Three factors explain the result.

• Language first. Russian is heavily inflected, so a query and the page that answers it often use different forms of the same word. Yandex's founders had worked on that problem for seven years before the public engine launched.
• The rivals stopped indexing. Rambler took Yandex's results from 2011, and Mail.ru relied on Google until 2013. For most of the period in which Russian search habits formed, Yandex was the only large domestic company ranking its own copy of the Russian web.
• A portal around the search box. Its own services and, from October 2017, the Alice assistant gave users reasons to open Yandex directly.

The weak point was mobile, where the default engine is whatever the operating system ships with, and in Russia that meant Android and Google. The European Commission's July 2018 Google Android decision records StatCounter data for 2016 in which Google and Yandex were almost level on PCs, 47% against 46%, while on smart mobile devices Google led 65% to 32%. The Commission noted that Yandex's own metrics gave it a much higher share, so treat those numbers as showing direction, not size. That mobile gap is why Yandex went to the regulator.

The FAS Android case, 2015 to 2017

Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) issued the first national ruling against Google's Android search arrangements, a mechanism the European Commission and the Japan Fair Trade Commission later examined too.

• February 2015. Yandex complained to the FAS. It filed a parallel complaint with the European Commission on 15 April 2015.
• 18 September 2015. The FAS found that Google had abused a dominant position under Part 1, Article 10 of the Law "On Protection of Competition", by tying the Google Play store to pre-installation of Google search and apps with priority home-screen placement, and by barring rival apps from pre-installation.
• 11 August 2016. The FAS fined Google Inc. RUB 438,067,400, about US$6.76 million at that day's rate.
• 17 April 2017. Under a settlement reported at the time, Google stopped requiring pre-installation of its search on Android in Russia and added an engine choice to the Chrome search widget, open to rival applicants for 60 days.

Yandex later credited the settlement with its Android gains in 2018 and 2019, while stating in its US filing for 2019 that it "can provide no assurance that Google is fully complying". The case established, before any other regulator did, that default placement on a phone is a competitive asset worth litigating over.

Russian search engine market share over time

Yandex has published share figures for more than a decade, in US Securities and Exchange Commission filings and later in investor presentations. The measure changed partway through: up to 2014 it cited LiveInternet, a Russian counter service whose sample leans toward Russian-language sites, and later its own Yandex Radar. The two series are not continuous.

The same LiveInternet series put Mail.ru at 8.6% in 2013; by September 2026, on StatCounter, it was below half a percent.

Three readings are safe. Yandex has led throughout. Google's share has fallen since 2019 on both Radar and StatCounter. And the device split is large: on Radar for 2022, Yandex held 71.0% on desktop but 57.9% on mobile, and only 47.6% on iOS. Yandex's rise since 2022 coincides with Google's reduced operations in Russia, so it should not be read as a verdict on search quality.

Each measure leans. StatCounter samples sites carrying its tracker, which skew international and tend to favor Google; LiveInternet sampled mostly Russian-language sites and tended to favor Yandex; Radar is the company measuring itself. The familiar "about 60%" figure is not wrong so much as dated, matching Yandex's own numbers for 2012 to 2014 and 2021 to 2022.

Who owns Yandex Search now

Until 2024 Yandex Search belonged to Yandex N.V., a Dutch holding company. On 15 July 2024 it completed the sale of all its Russia-based businesses, search included, to a Russian investor consortium for about US$5.4 billion, and in August 2024 renamed itself Nebius Group N.V. Nebius owns no search engine. The Russian parent is now IPJSC Yandex (MKPAO Yandex), so the shorthand "Yandex is now Nebius" is wrong: yandex.ru is owned and run in Russia, under Russian law. In March 2022 Mozilla removed Yandex and Mail.ru as optional search providers in Firefox.

Yandex outside Russia

Yandex's other significant markets are former Soviet states where Russian is widely used. StatCounter, September 2026: Belarus Google 58.98%, Yandex 38.54%; Kazakhstan Google 68.15%, Yandex 29.72%; Ukraine Google 90.67%, Yandex 6.26%. Ukraine moved to block Yandex in 2017; the exact decree was not re-verified for this page. StatCounter's 14.98% Yandex reading for China in the same month is almost certainly a tracker artefact, not Chinese users.

When this page was checked

Checked 27 October 2026. StatCounter figures are for September 2026; Radar figures carry the period Yandex published. StatCounter's Russian Federation table is free and monthly, so the independent figure can be re-checked at source.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• IPJSC Yandex (MKPAO Yandex) — IPJSC Yandex Company Presentation, October 2025 (slide 10, Search and AI services) (2025, PDF)
• Yandex N.V. — Yandex Company Presentation, November 2022 (slide 14, Search & Portal) (2022, PDF)
• Yandex N.V. (filed with US SEC) — Yandex N.V. Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, pp. 34 and 47 (2023, PDF)
• Yandex N.V. (filed with US SEC) — Yandex N.V. Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2013 (Item 4, competition), p. 59 of… (2014, PDF)
• European Commission — Commission Decision of 18.7.2018, Case AT.40099 Google Android, recital 814(3) (2018, PDF)
• en.fas.gov.ru/press-center/news/detail.html?id=46765
• sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1513845/000155837020003551/f20-f.htm
• yastatic.net/s3/ir-docs/docs/2024/q4/cbf2d1c3ff32ff65da6l438h44902945/IR_4Q2…
• yandex.com/company/press_center/press_releases/2011/2011-06-23
• gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/russian-federation
• jurist.org/news/2017/04/google-reaches-settlement-with-russia-regulators
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex_Search