Yandex

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 19 August 2026

What Yandex is, and where its results come from

Yandex is Russia's dominant search engine and the anchor of a large Russian internet group: search, maps, email, ride-hailing and delivery, a marketplace, music and video, a browser and a cloud business. On yandex.ru a search returns a portal-style page — web results alongside heavily integrated Yandex properties (Maps, Market, Music, the Alice assistant) and, increasingly, a generated answer at the top.

Yandex crawls the web itself and ranks its own index — its own stored copy of the web, built by its own robots. No partner supplies its organic web results. That puts it in a group of perhaps four to six genuinely independent full-web indexes anywhere in the world, which makes the label "regional search engine" misleading about what it actually is.

Its real technical distinction is Russian-language search quality. Russian is heavily inflected, and Yandex's morphological analysis, query parsing and ranking for Russian are widely regarded as better than Google's. That, and not home-market lock-in alone, is a large part of why it has held its market.

The most important thing a reader arriving from an older article needs to know is that Yandex changed hands on 15 July 2024. Anything describing it as a Dutch company, or as Nasdaq-listed under YNDX, is out of date.

The crawler and the index

The main indexing robot is YandexBot, which identifies itself with a user-agent string pointing at Yandex's own bot documentation. It is one of roughly forty named Yandex robots listed in the company's webmaster documentation, each with its own user-agent token — YandexImages for image indexing, YandexVideo, YandexMobileBot for mobile page detection, YandexMarket for product catalogues, YandexMetrika for analytics, and others. The documentation records for each robot whether it obeys general robots.txt directives; some are documented as ignoring them.

Yandex publishes no IP list. Instead it documents a four-step reverse-DNS check: take the address from your logs, reverse-look-up the hostname, confirm it ends in yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com, then forward-resolve that hostname back to the same address. Yandex's own page warns that robots can disguise themselves using its user agents, which is exactly why the round trip is needed.

Crawling runs in two tiers: a main robot and a separate fast robot for frequently updating sources such as news sites. English Wikipedia's account of Yandex Search records roughly one billion sites checked monthly.

On ranking, Yandex has published more than most: MatrixNet, a gradient-boosting system announced in 2009; the CatBoost library from 2016; and the neural-ranking releases it named Palekh (2016), Korolyov (2017) and Vega (2019). These are the vendor's own descriptions of its own system, not audited findings, and should be read that way.

The source-code leak, and what it confirmed

In January 2023 roughly 44 GB of Yandex source code was leaked by a former employee. Security researchers and search analysts who examined it reported that it contained a large list of ranking factors used by Yandex search. Yandex confirmed a code repository had leaked, said the material was an outdated fragment, and denied any breach of user data.

This matters beyond the news cycle. It is one of very few occasions on which a major search engine's internal ranking code has become public, and it independently corroborates a claim that would otherwise rest on Yandex's word: that Yandex ranks its own index rather than reselling somebody else's results.

The reverse relationship is worth noting too. Yandex has historically been a supplier of search results, powering or part-powering search for third parties in Turkey and some non-Russian markets, since it is one of the few independent indexes available to license. That business is much diminished after sanctions, and any current partner list should be treated as unverified.

Ownership: the 2024 split, dated precisely

Two entities that used to be one are now unrelated companies, and confusing them is the most common factual error written about Yandex.

5 February 2024 — Yandex N.V., the Dutch holding company, announces an agreement to sell all its Russia-based businesses to a consortium for approximately RUB 475 billion (about USD 5.2 billion at the time), which it described as roughly half fair market value, reflecting a mandatory discount and an exit tax on foreign sellers of Russian assets.
15 July 2024 — the divestment completes, for approximately USD 5.4 billion subject to adjustment, in a cash-and-shares transaction. Yandex Search, yandex.ru and the Yandex brand in Russia pass to the Russian consortium.
August 2024 — the Dutch remainder is renamed Nebius Group N.V. and relists on Nasdaq as an AI-infrastructure company, keeping Nebius AI cloud, Toloka, Avride and TripleTen. It does not own Yandex Search and has no operational relationship with it.

The post-deal Russian owner is Yandex LLC / MKPAO «Yandex». Wikipedia's summary of the cap table gives Alexander Chachava around 25%, Pavel Prass around 15%, Lukoil via Argonaut around 15%, Alexander Ryazanov around 10% and senior management around 35%.

So: Yandex was not renamed Nebius. The holding company was renamed and kept the non-Russian businesses; the search engine was sold and kept the name.

How it makes money, and its relationship with the state

The revenue engine is advertising. Yandex Direct sells search and contextual ads on an auction basis against queries and across a network of partner sites, functionally analogous to Google Ads. Around it sits a diversified group: Yandex Market on marketplace commission and advertising, Yandex Taxi, Eats and Lavka on delivery and ride-hailing take rates, Yandex Plus as a bundled consumer subscription, Yandex Cloud sold as metered infrastructure, and Yandex 360 as business software.

Yandex is not state-funded and has never been state-owned. It is also not straightforwardly independent of the state. Sberbank, which is state-owned, held a "golden share" from 2009 with veto rights over large stakes; a 2019 restructuring moved that share to a Russian public-interest foundation; and the 2024 sale was conducted under Russian government approval to buyers acceptable to the Kremlin. The accurate description is a commercial advertising business operating with the state's consent.

Financial figures need care. Yandex N.V.'s Nasdaq filings ended with the divestment, and the post-2024 Russian entity's disclosures are not equivalently audited for a Western reader. Pre-2024 Yandex N.V. financials do not describe the current company and should not be quoted as though they do.

Privacy, filtering and jurisdiction

Yandex publishes a privacy policy, offers search-history controls and account-level deletion of query history, and ships an incognito mode and DNSCrypt support in Yandex Browser. Those are real features. They are also not the relevant fact.

Jurisdiction is. As a Russian "organiser of information dissemination", Yandex falls under Russian data-localisation law (Federal Law 242-FZ), the SORM lawful-interception regime, and the 2016 "Yarovaya package" (Federal Laws 374-FZ and 375-FZ), which oblige in-scope services to store user communications and metadata and make them available to the security services. This is not an allegation about Yandex's conduct; it is the legal environment it operates in.

Results served to Russian users are filtered in line with Russian law, and that filtering is not fully disclosed on the results page. Yandex must comply with Roskomnadzor blocking orders and with the Russian "right to be forgotten" law, Federal Law 264-FZ, in force since 1 January 2016. Independent measurement work has repeatedly found that results in Russia suppress or downrank material the state has designated unlawful, including material about the war in Ukraine.

Two related events belong on the record. Yandex.News aggregated only from Roskomnadzor-registered outlets, which in practice meant a state-approved list; in August 2022 Yandex sold Yandex.News and Yandex.Zen to VK. And in 2022 a former Yandex executive, Lev Gershenzon, publicly criticised the company for what he characterised as a key role in hiding information about the war from Russians.

Sanctions touched individuals as well as the business: co-founder Arkady Volozh was sanctioned by the EU in June 2022 and de-listed in March 2024 after publicly condemning the invasion.

AI features

Yandex builds its AI layer itself — partly by choice, and partly because sanctions foreclose the alternative of licensing a Western model.

Alice (Алиса) — the voice assistant, launched October 2017 on Yandex's own models, embedded in Search, Yandex Browser, the mobile app and Yandex Station smart speakers.
YandexGPT — Yandex's own large language model family, first announced in May 2023, with successive versions since.
Neuro (Нейро) — a generative-answer mode introduced in search in 2024, powered by YandexGPT, alongside article and video summarisation in Yandex Browser.

Generated answers appear above organic results on many queries. Whether a durable, account-level global off switch exists is unverified — no documented, stable settings guidance from Yandex confirming a persistent opt-out for AI answers in web search could be found as of August 2026.

Market share, and who it suits

72.85% of the Russian search market in July 2026, per StatCounter GlobalStats across all platforms, with Google second at 25.48%, Mail.ru at 0.69% and Bing at 0.69%. Worldwide, Yandex is a low-single-digit player; Wikipedia cites around 2.8%.

Sources disagree on the Russian figure, and the disagreement is methodological. Yandex has historically reported its own Russian share through Yandex Radar at levels above StatCounter's, in the high-50s to mid-60s on some measures and higher on others. StatCounter counts page views on sites carrying its tracking code; Yandex Radar measures through Yandex's own network. They are not measuring the same thing, so no single number is "the" market share.

One StatCounter figure should be ignored outright: its China table for July 2026 lists Yandex at 13.2%, which is not a credible description of Chinese consumer search behaviour and is far more likely an artefact of a small and skewed China panel.

Where Yandex is strong: Russian-language search, by a distance. Local Russian and CIS intent — maps, transit, business listings, addresses — where its data beats Google's. Reverse image search, which has a long-standing reputation among open-source investigators for finding matches, particularly faces and non-Western sources, that Google Images and TinEye miss; that is a widely repeated practitioner observation rather than a controlled benchmark.

Where it is a poor choice. Anyone who needs unfiltered results on Russian politics or the war in Ukraine: results are filtered and the user cannot see what was removed. Anyone whose privacy threat model includes the Russian state — journalists, activists, dissidents, Russia researchers. Anyone outside the Russian-speaking world looking for a general-purpose Google alternative: yandex.com's non-Russian coverage is thin and degraded relative to the Russian index, and it lost most Western commercial integrations after 2022. Anyone needing a durable, sanctions-clean commercial counterparty. Transparency has also fallen since 2024: the company is privately held with no equivalent to SEC-filing discipline, and verifiable information is harder to get than it was in the Nasdaq era.

Frequently asked questions

Does Yandex have its own search index?

Yes. Yandex crawls the web with its own robots, led by YandexBot, and ranks its own index. It does not use Google's or Bing's results. It is one of only about four to six organisations worldwide operating a genuinely independent full-web index, and the January 2023 leak of its source code, which analysts found contained ranking-factor code, corroborates that its ranking is its own.

Is Yandex a Russian or a Dutch company?

Russian. It was controlled by Yandex N.V., a Dutch holding company, until the divestment of its Russia-based businesses completed on 15 July 2024. Since then Yandex Search, yandex.ru and the Yandex brand in Russia have been owned by a Russian investor consortium and domiciled in Moscow. Any source calling Yandex Dutch or Nasdaq-listed describes a structure that no longer exists.

Was Yandex renamed Nebius?

No, and this is a common confusion. Yandex N.V., the holding company, was renamed Nebius Group N.V. in August 2024 and kept only the non-Russian businesses: Nebius AI cloud, Toloka, Avride and TripleTen. It relisted on Nasdaq as an AI-infrastructure company. Yandex the search engine was sold separately and kept its name. The two are now unrelated companies.

Is Yandex owned by the Russian government?

No. Yandex has never been state-owned. State-owned Sberbank held a golden share with veto rights from 2009 until a 2019 restructuring moved it to a Russian public-interest foundation, and the 2024 sale required Russian government approval and went to buyers acceptable to the Kremlin. "State-influenced and operating with state consent" is accurate; "state-owned" is not.

What is Yandex's market share in Russia?

StatCounter GlobalStats measured Yandex at 72.85% of Russian search in July 2026 across all platforms, with Google at 25.48%. Yandex's own Yandex Radar has historically reported different figures, in the high-50s to mid-60s on some measures. The two use different methods — StatCounter counts page views on sites carrying its tracker, Yandex Radar measures through Yandex's network — so neither is definitive.

Does Yandex censor search results?

Results served to Russian users are filtered to comply with Russian law, and the filtering is not fully disclosed on the results page. Yandex must honour Roskomnadzor blocking orders and de-listing requests under Federal Law 264-FZ, the Russian right-to-be-forgotten law in force since January 2016. Independent measurement has repeatedly found suppression or downranking of material the Russian state has designated unlawful, including about the war in Ukraine.

Is Yandex a good privacy alternative to Google?

No, and it does not market itself as one. If your concern is commercial ad tracking, its behaviour is broadly comparable to Google's. If your concern includes the Russian state, Yandex offers no meaningful protection: it stores Russian users' data in Russia by law and falls within the SORM interception regime and the 2016 Yarovaya retention obligations. That is a fact of jurisdiction, not an allegation.

Is Yandex still operating?

Yes. Both yandex.ru and yandex.com resolve and serve live results as of August 2026, and StatCounter put Yandex at roughly 73% of Russian search in July 2026 — it gained share as Google's Russian operations were disrupted. What shrank is its international presence: the yandex.com front end was materially cut back after 2022 and most Western commercial integrations ended.