Alice AI blocks now appear in 15% of Yandex's product search results

How has source selection become stricter?

After the June update, Alice began using fewer queries when generating an answer: in April, one original query produced roughly four derivative queries, while in July — slightly more than two. The source selection criteria became stricter in 2026:

• 5 pages per query;
• more than half of sources — from the top 5;
• more than 90% — from the top 10.

After the June 25 update, product sections in full answers became noticeably more numerous. Commercial sections now come in two types — “store” sections and “product” sections. Store sections are formed based on the sources selected by Alice (sometimes literally only one or two end up there). Product sections follow a different logic: the source page is merely a starting point for generating queries to Yandex.Market, and product cards are taken from Yandex's service. The store whose page was used as the source gets no advantage: a link from the card may lead to a competitor.

What does the data about shoppers say?

According to a survey by Ashmanov and Partners, online shoppers pay attention to the AI block 30% more often than to regular search results. Some more figures:

• 69% of respondents agree that AI services speed up the search and study of products;
• 74% use AI answers in search engines;
• two thirds of respondents made purchases immediately after interacting with AI: 14% often, 52% sometimes;
• for 38% of respondents, the purchased item often or almost always matches the neural network's recommendation, and for another 45% a match happens sometimes.

In terms of prevalence, AI services still lag behind marketplaces and search engines, but among their users they lead in four of seven popular scenarios: searching for purchase ideas, comparing products, studying specifications, and finding good prices. A new product search scenario is taking shape, where quick AI answers become an entry point into a dialogue with Alice AI, and competition within the full answer is waged both for a spot on the list of recommended stores and for inclusion in the product section, where prices and ratings play the key role.

Research methodology: data from Alice's answers was collected manually, Yandex and Google search results — automatically; a methodology for statistically assessing the influence of factors on getting into the set of answer sources, developed at the Search Analytics Laboratory, was applied.