In June 2026, Google and Yandex rolled out multiple updates that shook up the search results. Established informational websites experienced a drop in rankings.
Since users now get instant answers from Google and Yandex, they rarely bother clicking through to the actual websites. A ready-made, comprehensive AI-generated answer synthesizes all the necessary information, which is often enough to fully satisfy the reader.
The logic behind search engine requirements aims to provide the most precise answer to a query directly from available sources, without the need to visit the original website.
Let’s look at the background of this problem
In the early days of SEO, websites would reach the top 10 simply by stuffing keywords separated by commas.
Later, the rules got tougher, and search engines began prioritizing meaningful, expert-written content.
What is required is not merely readable content, but a brief, distilled summary of experience and knowledge.
It’s highly likely that search engines will eventually only show Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.
It would be desirable for search engine optimizers to take AI-generated results into account only in activities where the outcome can be precisely measured and expressed in terms of figures, quantities, and dimensions. This is because visual creative perception—and results that depend on a combination of many variables—cannot be captured in precise figures and words. This is where artificial intelligence begins to mislead, curating responses from sources selected according to predefined developer parameters, rather than on their actual merits.
What changed in June 2026
- The AIs of Google and Yandex generate direct, complex answers right below the search bar.
- Google rolled out a spam update, and the targeting logic within Google Ads began to change (specifically for the Demand Gen format). Ad serving has been limited for advertisers not meeting policy requirements. Support for Manifest V2 extensions has been discontinued.
- At Yandex, evaluating the usefulness of information has become the top priority. Yandex Direct now features Unified Performance Campaigns. For manual campaigns, daily budgets are being replaced by weekly budgets. Additionally, a new interface for advertising reports has been in effect since June 22.
Summary
Overall, SEO has come to resemble targeted Yandex Advertising Network ads run on a monthly budget: everything is concise, clear, and free of fluff.