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Yandex’s Alice AI reaches 49.5 million users
Yandex says Alice AI quick answers reached 49.5 million monthly users and appeared for 42% of Search queries in Q2 2026.
Image: ITzine
Yandex says the monthly audience for Alice AI quick answers in Search reached 49.5 million people in the second quarter of 2026. The short answers now appear for approximately 42% of queries, up 7 percentage points from the previous quarter.
How Alice AI Search works
Yandex attributes the growth to a new generation of compact Alice AI Search models. The company says they were trained specifically to handle high traffic and use a hybrid architecture that combines Mixture of Experts (MoE) with an encoder-decoder design.
The format is intended to answer queries directly in the search results. Yandex says quick answers are assembled from open sources and include links to those sources. When a query calls for a different format, Search can direct users to images, products, or videos.
Yandex’s comparison with Google AI Overviews
Yandex compared its new models with Google’s AI Overviews in a blind Side-by-Side test. According to Yandex, its system performed better in 56.7% of cases, with the clearest advantage on complex queries requiring context and on topics related to medicine and law.
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The company did not provide further details about the test’s participants, query set, or methodology, and the result has not been independently verified in the source report.
Google is expanding AI Overviews in Search, while Microsoft is adding answers to Bing through Copilot. Yandex is seeking to establish its own answer format directly in the search bar. The figures indicate that the competition is not only about total reach: it also concerns how often users receive an answer immediately instead of leaving the search results for another site.
Arthur Berg is a senior news editor specializing in rapid analysis of the electronics and gaming-systems markets. He has published more than 2,800 articles on mobile-industry developments, wearable devices, and cloud technology. He covers major international exhibitions, including IFA, and analyzes the strategies of leading technology brands in the Russian and global markets.
AI Editor
Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via ITzine
