Yandex AI produces a written answer to a query, automatically or when the user asks for it. It breaks a complex question down, finds sources, analyses them in real time with a generative model, and combines the result into one answer with references to the original sources — the only exception being solutions to school maths problems. A follow-up search box sits beneath the answer.
How pages get used
Answers are generated from pages Yandex has already indexed. Yandex states what makes inclusion more likely in one sentence: information that is well structured, informative and grammatically correct.
Nothing else is on offer — no markup, no submission, no opt-in. Being usable by a summariser is the same work as being readable by a person: state the fact plainly, keep the structure clean, do not bury the answer.
The opt-out, which is the concrete part
To keep a site’s content out of AI answers, disallow YandexAdditional or YandexAdditionalBot in robots.txt:
User-agent: YandexAdditionalBot
Disallow: /cats/mycat.htmlThe change takes effect when the robots recrawl the page — typically 2 to 14 days. Note that this is page-level as well as site-level: a single URL can be excluded while the rest remains eligible.
The decision behind the directive
Opting out removes the citation as well as the summary. For a publisher whose value is the full article, that may be right; for a business whose pages answer practical questions, being the cited source is usually worth more than the click it might have replaced. It is a commercial decision, and it is reversible — but slowly, on the same 2-to-14-day cycle.
What to measure
Impressions can rise while clicks fall when an answer resolves the query on the results page. Reporting the two separately keeps that from being read as a ranking loss, because the position has not moved.
How we apply this
We report AI-surface behaviour separately from ordinary results, because otherwise a click-through decline with steady position reads as a failure. On the opt-out we advise against it for most clients: the citation is visibility they would otherwise pay for. Publishers whose product is the article itself are the exception, and there the directive is page-level, which lets them protect the archive without leaving entirely.
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