ISTANBUL

Yandex Türkiye has invested $50 million as part of a $400 million plan to enhance its search engine services in Türkiye, according to Alexander Popovskiy, general manager of Yandex Türkiye and CEO of Yandex Search International.

Speaking to Anadolu during WORLDEF Istanbul 2025, Popovskiy emphasized that Türkiye's dynamic and competitive e-commerce sector presents a unique opportunity for digital innovation.

“E-commerce in Türkiye is something really very unique, it is already around 20% of total retail turnover. So, this is very impressive,” he said.

Popovskiy said Yandex has long positioned itself as a bridge between buyers and sellers, and is now expanding its tools in Türkiye with the introduction of the Merchants platform.

“Here today, we're introducing Yandex Türkiye Merchants. This is a tool which is very helpful for merchants currently to get new traffic and control their performance inside Yandex search results,” Popovskiy said.

He added that Yandex Metrica is “a powerful analytics tool” offered for free to help emerging e-commerce platforms track user behavior.

Yandex’s advertising services, which reach more than 100 million people globally, are also being promoted to Turkish businesses. “Many Turkish companies are already successfully using Yandex Ads to grow their reach and boost their sales,” he said.

Popovskiy confirmed that Yandex Türkiye’s initial $50 million investment is part of a $400 million commitment announced last year, focused primarily on enhancing its search engine.

“We are focusing on improving as a finding engine currently. We believe that this is going to be a locomotive for many more Yandex services to follow,” he said. “Fasten the seatbelts, there will be a lot of new announcements from Yandex Türkiye, both inside our search engine, inside Yandex Maps, and other services.”

The company’s AI tool for detailed and source-based answers, Yazeka, has also seen significant uptake among Turkish users.

“Customers now are using AI more and more. It helps them to solve their traditional searching tasks faster and in a more comprehensive way,” Popovskiy explained.

The tool has recently been upgraded to include visual and video results alongside traditional text, enhancing finding information, especially about complex items and providing useful hints for deeper searches.

On the regulatory front, Popovskiy praised Türkiye’s approach to fostering competition in e-commerce, attributing it to long-standing regulatory policies.

He urged similar frameworks be extended to search engines and browsers. “This is not some kind of coincidence. This is a result of efforts and ideas that Turkish regulators have been implementing for quite a while,” he said.

Popovskiy argued that global digital platforms should be subject to country-level regulations to ensure user choice. “Effectively, return choice back to users themselves, so that they choose search engines, they choose browsers, they choose AI assistants themselves—and not use just something that was pre-selected by device vendors,” he said.

He also welcomed Türkiye’s proposal to regulate digital platforms, currently under consideration in parliament.

“We believe that faster adoption of those amendments is absolutely needed for the Turkish market to be ready for competition, not only for browsers and search engines, but also for artificial intelligence, chatbots, and other new tools,” he said.

Reflecting on the conference, Popovskiy said artificial intelligence was one of the most discussed topics and expressed satisfaction with Türkiye’s rapid adoption of these technologies.

“We can proudly say that we were the first in the Turkish market to introduce artificial intelligence in search results, and now Yazeka remains the pioneer in this area,” he said. “We believe that this is a good track for the industry to follow, and we're really happy that Turkish users already enjoy this technology.”​​​​​​​