Yandex is a search engine and technology company based in Russia. It is the leading search engine in Russia and is used in some other Russian-speaking markets. It runs its own crawler, index and ranking systems, and offers Yandex Webmaster for site owners. Most Western B2B SaaS companies will not target Yandex, but companies selling into those markets need to account for it.
Yandex Webmaster
Yandex Webmaster lets you verify a site, submit sitemaps, see indexing status, check for security issues and set a region for the site. Yandex also supports IndexNow for notifying it about new or changed URLs.
How it differs from Google
Yandex has historically given weight to regional relevance and has its own approach to links and user behavior signals. It processes Russian morphology natively, which matters for keyword research in a highly inflected language. Its robots.txt handling also includes some Yandex-specific directives, such as Clean-param for ignoring URL parameters.
User-agent: Yandex
Clean-param: utm_source&utm_medium&utm_campaignBusiness considerations
Sanctions, payment restrictions and data rules affect whether and how a company can operate in markets where Yandex is dominant. That decision belongs with legal and leadership. SEO work for Yandex should follow, not lead, that decision.
Common mistakes
Assuming Google tactics transfer directly
Keyword research, language handling and webmaster tooling differ. Use Yandex's own tools and native-language research.
Questions
Yes. Yandex documents its robots.txt support, including some directives other engines ignore.
Sources
