Yandex AI consulting: from Yandex SEO to the source in Yandex AI answers.

We wrote this guide for ecommerce, service and corporate site owners who want to appear in Yandex search in Türkiye and be cited as a source in Yandex’s artificial intelligence (AI) answers. Yandex SEO and visibility in Yandex’s AI answers rest on the same foundation: the answers are generated from pages Yandex has indexed. Every rule we describe is based on the Yandex Webmaster and Yandex Metrica help documentation and on official announcements from Yandex Türkiye and Yandex; we verified product names against the source as of September 2026. Our own field observations are marked separately under the heading “Expert note”.

Yandex AI (GEO) work runs in three layers: getting the site into the Yandex index with the right URL and the right region, shaping pages so they can be sources in Yazeka answers, and measuring visibility in Türkiye with Yandex Webmaster and Yandex Metrica. We explain the general logic of AI answers, including the more capable systems now discussed as superintelligence (ASI), on our GEO consulting page; this guide goes down into the mechanism and controls specific to Yandex.

Yazeka and Alice AI: how do Yandex’s AI answers appear in Türkiye?

Yandex’s AI answer is a short, source-linked answer to a search question, generated from pages Yandex has indexed; in Türkiye this feature is offered under the name Yazeka.¹³ Yandex’s help pages on yandex.com refer to the same feature as “Search with Yandex AI”.⁶ Yazeka can break difficult questions into parts, find relevant sources and analyze them in real time with a generative neural network, then combine the findings into a single answer; it links to the original sources in every answer except primary and middle school math problems.¹ The answer appears automatically or when the user opens Yazeka, with a search box below it for follow-up questions.¹

Yandex described the model that produces AI answers in Search in an announcement dated September 2026: the Alice AI Search model has been running in Yandex Search since July 2026, answers are shown just below the search bar, and more than 49 million people use the feature each month.² Alice AI, also referred to as Yandex Alice, is the name of the conversational AI assistant Yandex introduced in October 2025 and of the generative model family behind it.¹³ According to the announcement, the search model’s architecture separates processing sources from generating the answer; the quality tests, however, were run on Russian-language answers.² The announcement doesn’t mention Yazeka or Turkish answers specifically.

Why is Yandex SEO the foundation of AI visibility on Yandex?

Because Yazeka answers are generated automatically from pages Yandex has indexed, a page that isn’t in the Yandex index isn’t expected to be a source in these answers.¹ The first job of Yandex SEO is getting the page crawled, indexed and shown at the right URL; content work is built on top of that foundation.

We check a site built for Google separately on Yandex, because Yandex states that it may interpret robots.txt directives written for other search engines’ and services’ robots differently.⁵ We start the check with how a page is removed from search.

The second check is the file itself: Yandex reads robots.txt as a file no larger than 500 KB, sitting in the root directory and returning 200 OK; if these conditions aren’t met, the site is treated as open to indexing.⁵ A robots.txt that returns an error code by mistake effectively cancels every restriction written in it.

How do you set up and monitor a site in Yandex Webmaster?

The site is added to Yandex Webmaster with the URL it will appear under in search results, management rights are verified and Webmaster’s optimization recommendations are read;⁴ then the sitemap is submitted and index status is monitored.

1. URL: the site is added in exactly the form it will appear in search results: with HTTP or HTTPS, with or without the www prefix.⁴
2. Rights verification: ownership is verified with an HTML file placed in the root directory, a meta tag on the home page or a DNS TXT record;⁴¹⁴ the verifying user gets the Owner role and can assign other users the Edit, View or Partial access role.¹⁴
3. Sitemap: the XML or TXT file is declared in robots.txt or on Webmaster’s sitemap page; Yandex usually processes the file within two weeks of it being added to Webmaster.⁹
4. Diagnostics: Webmaster’s optimization recommendations and the errors it finds are read regularly; according to Yandex, adding the site doesn’t guarantee appearing in search.⁴

Account ownership is settled at this step too: the Yandex Webmaster and Yandex Metrica accounts are opened with your Yandex ID. In Webmaster, only a user with the Owner role assigns, changes and revokes roles; a user with the Edit role manages the site but can’t assign roles to others.¹⁴ Ownership stays with you; our team works with the Edit role you assign, and when the work ends you simply revoke it.

How do sitemaps and IndexNow notify Yandex of changes?

A sitemap describes the site’s current structure to Yandex;⁹ IndexNow notifies a new, changed or deleted page directly, without waiting for the bot to recrawl the site.⁸ In IndexNow, ownership is proven with a key: the key is generated, placed on the site as a file and sent along with requests; Yandex checks the key on every request.⁸ A GET request is sent to the yandex.com/indexnow endpoint for a single page, and a POST request for several pages.⁸

Neither method guarantees indexing; Yandex states this separately in its IndexNow and sitemap documentation.⁸⁹ We close out every notification by reading in Webmaster whether the page was indexed. On WordPress sites, we tie notifications to the publishing flow and send only URLs that have genuinely changed.

How are robots.txt and Clean-param written for Yandex?

For Yandex, robots.txt is written with the User-agent, Disallow, Allow, Sitemap and Clean-param directives; according to Yandex, Disallow, Sitemap and Clean-param are needed most often.⁵ Clean-param tells Yandex to ignore, for indexing, URL parameters that don’t change page content, such as UTM tags.⁵⁷

We prefer Clean-param to Disallow, because according to Yandex this directive lets some accumulated metrics carry over to the main URL or the site.⁷ The syntax is “Clean-param: param1&param2 /path”; the first field takes the parameters to ignore, the second the path prefix the rule applies to, and the rule can be up to 500 characters long.⁷ Yandex’s algorithms can strip analytics parameters such as ysclid, yrclid and utm_source on their own if they find them insignificant; there’s no need to add separate lines to robots.txt for them.⁷ If the same URL falls under both Disallow and Clean-param, Disallow applies and the page isn’t indexed.⁷

On ecommerce sites, sorting, filter and session parameters produce many copies of the same product listing; according to Yandex’s documentation, as these duplicate pages multiply, the bot crawls the site more slowly and important changes reach search later.⁷ That’s why we build the parameter list from real URLs in the server log and update it whenever a new filter is added to the site.

What does YandexAdditional do, and how are Yandex bots verified?

YandexAdditional and YandexAdditionalBot are names used in robots.txt to limit the use of a page’s content in Yazeka answers; a Disallow written for these names stops the page from appearing in the AI answer.¹ According to Yandex’s bot list, these names apply to pages the main crawler has indexed and don’t make indexing requests.⁶ The change takes effect when the bots recrawl the page; this usually takes 2 to 14 days.¹

Reverse DNS is used to separate requests impersonating Yandex in the logs: a reverse lookup is run for the IP in the log, and the returned name must end in yandex.ru, yandex.net or yandex.com; then you check that the forward lookup returns the same IP.⁶ When searching the logs for Yandex robots, it’s recommended not to include the browser version in the search, because the version inside the user-agent can change.⁶ According to Yandex, some robots that do things other than indexing may ignore restrictions written in the asterisk group (User-agent: *).⁶ For Turkish-language sites, one more name matters: YandexComBot, which indexes content for search in languages other than Russian, also ignores the general rules; unless there’s a restriction written specifically for it, it can index the content.⁶ So we don’t leave the paths to be blocked only in the asterisk group; we write them under the robot’s name too.

How to appear in Yazeka: writing a page it can choose as a source

A page Yazeka can choose as a source presents information in a well-structured, informative and grammatically correct way; according to Yandex, these three qualities increase the likelihood of the page being used in an answer.¹ Yazeka understands questions asked in everyday language and goes deeper into the topic in dialogue mode;³ it also looks for sources by breaking a difficult question into its parts.¹ So we build the page with headings that cover the parts of the question rather than a single keyword.

• Question map: we pull the questions the page will answer from popular queries in Yandex Webmaster and from customer questions; the popular queries group covers the 3,000 queries that brought the most impressions in the last three months.¹¹
• The answer under the heading: the first sentence under each subheading is that heading’s answer; detail, tables and examples follow.
• Verifiable information: details such as price, dimensions, duration and conditions are written as text with their date, not embedded in images.
• Turkish: Turkish characters, correct suffixes and consistent terminology are used; according to Yandex Türkiye, search is localized to the subtleties of Turkish.³

How does the region setting affect searches in Türkiye?

The region setting is one of the signals that affects which region’s users a site is shown to for location-dependent queries; an assigned region doesn’t remove the site from other regions’ results.¹⁰ Yandex takes the region from the Webmaster setting and from business information in Yandex Business; a region isn’t needed for general-interest publishing sites, but is recommended for sites that sell services or products.¹⁰ A site is usually assigned a single region, determined by the real address shown on the site.¹⁰

Region requests go through moderation: contact and delivery information must be in a prominent place, and the site must be accessible and virus-free; Yandex also recommends not putting the address and phone number only in images.¹⁰ Moderation takes from a few days to a few weeks, and after moderation the change is applied within two weeks.¹⁰ On sites with several language versions, language markup is a separate topic; we explain how Yandex reads language versions on our international marketing page.

How do you measure Yandex traffic and AI visibility?

Measurement is built from three sources: Yandex Webmaster shows impressions, clicks and queries in search results, Yandex Metrica shows visits and behavior on the site, and a fixed question set is tracked for AI answers.¹¹¹² Webmaster’s query statistics can be split by region and device type; the region list includes the regions where the site appeared in the top 50 results at least once, and the data is updated daily.¹¹ Impression and click counts include dynamic placements alongside organic results; we read the report with that difference in mind.¹¹

Yandex Metrica determines the traffic source from the referrer and from tags; if a tag is present on the first pageview of the session, the source is read from the tag, otherwise from the referrer.¹² For search engine traffic, Metrica stores the search engine’s name and often the search query too.¹² Metrica’s source documentation doesn’t define a separate source type for AI answers; we don’t assume which heading a visit from a Yazeka source link will appear under, but determine it by testing during setup.

The third source is the question set: a fixed set of Turkish questions specific to your business is asked on Yandex at regular intervals, and whether your site is cited as a source in the Yazeka answer is recorded with the date. We monitor our own site, markention.com, with Yandex Webmaster and Yandex Metrica too.

How do Yandex AI consulting services progress in the first 30 days?

The job of the first 30 days is to read the site through Yandex’s eyes, fix index and region issues and set up measurement; the effect on AI answers is tracked after that.

1. Week 1 · Audit: access to Yandex Webmaster and Metrica is obtained from your accounts, or the accounts are opened in your name; diagnostics, index status, robots.txt, the sitemap and the region setting are reported in writing.
2. Week 2 · Technical setup: robots.txt and Clean-param rules are written, the sitemap is submitted, IndexNow is tied to the publishing flow and, if needed, a region request is sent.
3. Week 3 · Content: a question map is drawn from Webmaster queries, priority pages are edited, and the YandexAdditional decision is made together with you.
4. Week 4 · First reading: index status, query statistics and the question set are reported for the first time.

Some effects run beyond this period: a YandexAdditional change usually takes effect within 2 to 14 days,¹ a sitemap is usually processed within two weeks,⁹ and a region change is applied within two weeks after moderation.¹⁰ That’s why we read the first report as a baseline measurement.

Yandex work: inside your current agency, or separate?

Most sites in Türkiye are built for Google, and Yandex is remembered later. There are three ways to handle the Yandex-specific work (Webmaster and Metrica, Clean-param, the region setting, the YandexAdditional decision and Yazeka measurement):

We run Yandex work in the same plan as Google SEO and GEO; Yandex-specific rules are documented separately and shared work isn’t done twice.

How to choose a Yandex SEO agency

1. Yandex ID ownership: the Webmaster and Metrica accounts are opened with your Yandex ID; the Owner role stays with you and the partner works with the Edit role.
2. The right URL: the first report shows that the URL added to Webmaster is the one at the end of the redirect chain.
3. Where the parameter list comes from: Clean-param rules are drawn from real URLs in the server logs, not guessed.
4. The YandexAdditional decision: choices such as keeping content out of Yazeka answers are presented with reasons and written per page or folder, with your approval.
5. No assumptions in measurement: which Metrica source shows visits from Yazeka is established by testing, and visibility is logged with dates against a fixed question set.
6. Guarantee language: Yandex itself doesn’t guarantee indexing or being cited in an answer; a proposal that promises it is selling something no one can measure.

Yandex AI consulting pricing: what drives the cost?

The fee for Yandex AI and Yandex SEO services depends on scope; instead of package prices, we share estimated ranges. The deciding factors:

We work out the scope together in the first meeting and then send a written proposal; a one-off audit and setup can be discussed separately from monthly monitoring.

Yandex AI consulting pricing: estimated ranges

Estimated range, excluding VAT; rows marked “/ month” are monthly, the others are one-off. Scope is confirmed in a written proposal after the first meeting. As of October 2026.

Whichever partner you work with, we suggest getting concrete answers to four questions up front: which URL will be verified in Yandex Webmaster, which parameters Clean-param will be written for, what the YandexAdditional decision will be based on, and how Yazeka visibility will be measured. To see how AI assistants describe your brand, you can run our free AI visibility analysis. If you’d like to read how your site looks on Yandex today together, pick a meeting day that suits you below.