When most people think of Yandex, they picture Russia’s dominant search engine. The reality is considerably more complex. While Yandex built its reputation by challenging Google in its home market, the company has quietly established operations across four continents, from sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America. Understanding where Yandex actually operates outside Russia reveals both the company’s ambitions and the practical limits facing regional tech giants trying to expand globally.
The story of Yandex’s international presence is really two stories. One involves the company’s early attempts to export its search engine and core services to neighboring markets with cultural and linguistic ties to Russia. The other centers on Yango, the international mobility and delivery brand that has found unexpected success in markets where Yandex itself has virtually no recognition.
The Commonwealth of Independent States: Yandex’s Natural Extension
Yandex’s most obvious international markets are the former Soviet republics where Russian remains widely spoken. These countries represent the company’s earliest and most successful geographic expansion, though success varies dramatically by market.
Belarus demonstrates the strongest adoption outside Russia, with Yandex commanding approximately 30.52% search market share. This makes sense when you consider that roughly 70% of Belarusians speak Russian as their primary or secondary language. The country’s geographic proximity, shared history, and ongoing close political ties with Russia create an environment where Russian digital services face minimal cultural friction.
Kazakhstan follows with 24.78% market share for Yandex search. The country’s significant Russian-speaking population, particularly in northern regions, drives adoption. What’s notable here is that Kazakhstan represents a market where Google clearly dominates with 73.64% share, yet Yandex maintains a solid secondary position that would be enviable in most other international markets.
Ukraine presents a more complex picture. Despite Ukrainian authorities blocking Yandex services in 2017 citing national security concerns, the company still captures approximately 10% of search traffic. Users access Yandex through VPNs or other workarounds, suggesting real demand for the service independent of political considerations. This persistence illustrates a broader truth about tech platforms: once users integrate a service into their daily workflow, political restrictions don’t eliminate usage—they simply drive it underground.
Other CIS countries where Yandex maintains measurable presence include Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Armenia, Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. In most cases, these represent smaller market shares in the single digits, reflecting limited but consistent usage primarily among Russian-speaking minorities.
Turkey: The Unexpected Success Story
Turkey stands out as Yandex’s most successful international market by a significant margin. Depending on the measurement period, Yandex captures between 42.59% and 53.05% of Turkey’s search market—making it the only country outside Russia where Yandex actually beats Google.
This dominance isn’t accidental. Yandex opened a Turkish office in Istanbul in 2011 and launched a localized Turkish portal that went beyond simple translation. The company invested heavily in understanding Turkish search behavior, optimizing for the Turkish language’s unique grammatical structure, and building local partnerships. Unlike other international expansions that felt like afterthoughts, Turkey received sustained strategic attention.
The success also reflects Turkey’s unique position straddling Europe and Asia, with cultural ties to both Russia and the broader Middle East. Turkish users demonstrated willingness to adopt a search engine that wasn’t Google if it offered superior local relevance and understanding of Turkish language nuances.
What makes Turkey particularly important for understanding Yandex’s global strategy is what it proves: the company can compete successfully against Google in markets where it commits resources, builds local understanding, and offers genuinely differentiated value. The question becomes why Yandex hasn’t replicated this success elsewhere.
Yango: The International Mobility Play
While Yandex’s search engine struggles to gain traction outside its core markets, Yango—the international brand for Yandex’s mobility, delivery, and lifestyle services—has built substantial operations across unexpected geographies. Yango functions as a super-app combining ride-hailing, food delivery, item delivery, navigation, and marketplace services depending on the country.
The brand operates independently with headquarters in Dubai, a strategic choice that distances it from Russian associations while positioning it in a regional hub for Middle Eastern and African expansion. This structure has proven essential for operating in markets where Russian connections might create political or business complications.
African Expansion: Building from the Ground Up
Yango’s African presence began in 2018 and has grown to cover more than a dozen countries. Major markets include Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Zambia, Namibia, Ethiopia, and Morocco.
The African strategy differs fundamentally from Yandex’s approach elsewhere. Rather than competing against established Western tech companies, Yango entered markets with limited existing ride-hailing infrastructure. The company partners with local taxi operators, providing technology and optimization tools while letting locals maintain ownership and operations. This collaborative model addresses concerns about foreign tech companies extracting value while giving Yango the local knowledge essential for success.
Item and food delivery services launched in multiple African markets starting in 2022, with Ivory Coast and Zambia among the first. The super-app model proves particularly valuable in regions where users may have limited smartphone storage and prefer single applications that handle multiple needs.
Latin American Markets: Testing the Super-App Model
Yango entered Latin America in August 2022, starting with Bolivia before expanding to Peru, Guatemala, and Colombia. The initial Bolivia launch followed a deliberate small-market strategy—build the technology and brand in a manageable market before tackling larger, more competitive ones.
Peru represents Yango’s most ambitious Latin American bet. With approximately 230,000 vehicles operating as taxis in Lima and less than half using app-based services, the market presented clear opportunities. Yango’s value proposition centers on working exclusively with legally registered taxi companies rather than individual drivers, providing institutional support and regulatory compliance that individual driver models lack.
Yango Delivery services also operate in Chile, Mexico, and Peru, though these remain smaller operations compared to the ride-hailing business. The Latin American expansion continues, with Colombia seeing operations in multiple cities including Medellin, Cali, and Barranquilla.
Middle Eastern Operations and the Israel Complexity
Yango launched in Israel in December 2018 and quickly built a substantial business including ride-hailing, scooter rentals, and express grocery delivery. The Israeli operation employed approximately 400 people and represented one of Yango’s largest international markets.
However, data privacy concerns emerged in 2023 when Russian legislation required companies to provide user data to security services. Although Yango insisted that Israeli user data was stored outside Russia and governed by GDPR standards, the controversy persisted. In 2025, Yango divested its Israeli operations, transferring them to local franchise partners. This exit illustrates the ongoing challenges Russian-origin companies face in Western-aligned markets regardless of actual data practices.
Other Middle Eastern markets include UAE, Kuwait, and Egypt, where Yango launched Yango Play, an entertainment super-app, in 2024. The company also introduced AI-driven warehouse robotics in Dubai, suggesting ambitions beyond consumer-facing services.
European Presence: Limited but Persistent
Yandex maintains limited European operations outside Russia. The most notable include Finland and Norway, where Yango’s ride-hailing service continues operating despite 2023 data privacy warnings from regulators. Finnish authorities ultimately clarified that legislation requiring data sharing with Russian security services didn’t apply to taxi services, allowing operations to continue.
Express delivery services launched in Paris and London between 2021 and 2022 but closed by late 2022. Rather than abandoning these markets entirely, Yandex pivoted to selling delivery management technology to third-party retailers through Yango Deli Tech, moving from direct operations to B2B software licensing.
The Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—see some Yandex service usage, though detailed market data remains limited. These countries’ significant Russian-speaking populations drive adoption, though political considerations around Russian-origin technology create ongoing challenges.
The 2024 Restructuring: What Changed and What Didn’t
Yandex’s July 2024 restructuring separated Russian assets from international operations in response to sanctions and foreign ownership restrictions. This split created confusion about which services continued operating where.
The Russian assets, including the core search engine and domestic services, sold to a group of Russian investors for $5.3 billion and continue operating under the Yandex brand. The international technology operations, including AI development and cloud services, reorganized under Nebius Group and separated from Russia.
For users, this meant surprisingly little immediate change. Yango continues operating in its international markets as before, though now as an independent entity headquartered in Dubai rather than a subsidiary of the Russian parent company. Search services remain accessible globally, though marketing and development resources for non-Russian markets have shifted.
The restructuring does highlight an important reality: Yandex’s international ambitions are increasingly separate from its Russian operations. Whether this enables expansion in Western markets remains unclear, as associations with Russian origins persist regardless of corporate structure.
Why Geographic Expansion Remains Limited
Despite occasional success stories, Yandex’s global footprint remains modest compared to its ambitions. The company captures just 2.8% of global search market share, with almost all of that concentrated in Russia and immediate neighbors. Several factors explain these limits.
Language and cultural optimization, which gives Yandex advantages in Russian-speaking markets, becomes a liability elsewhere. Building comparable language processing for dozens of languages requires resources that even successful regional players struggle to marshal. Google’s decade-long head start and massive investment in multilingual search creates a competitive barrier that Yandex hasn’t overcome.
The company’s Russian origins create political complications in markets concerned about data sovereignty or digital infrastructure controlled by Russian entities. These concerns accelerated after 2022 but existed long before. Even when Yandex implements technically sound privacy protections, perception problems persist.
Network effects in search create winner-take-all dynamics. Users go where results are best, which depends on data from millions of searches feeding machine learning algorithms. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem: Yandex needs market share to improve results, but needs better results to gain market share. Breaking this cycle in established markets proves extraordinarily difficult.
Strategic focus also matters. Yandex devoted decades to building its Russian ecosystem before seriously pursuing international expansion. By the time the company turned attention to global markets, Google had already established overwhelming advantages in most countries. The resources required to challenge Google in dozens of markets simultaneously exceed what even a well-funded regional player can deploy.
What This Means for Users and Businesses
For consumers outside Russia, Yandex services provide genuine alternatives in specific contexts. Travelers to Russia, CIS countries, or Turkey benefit from Yandex’s superior local search results and services. Russian-speaking diaspora communities worldwide often prefer Yandex for content in their native language.
Yango offers competitive ride-hailing and delivery options in its coverage areas, often at lower prices than established competitors. The service proves particularly valuable in African and Latin American markets where alternatives remain limited.
Businesses targeting Russian-speaking audiences ignore Yandex at their own risk. With 60-72% share in Russia and strong positions in neighboring markets, optimizing for Yandex search isn’t optional for companies serious about these regions. The platform’s advertising services, particularly Yandex.Direct, provide access to audiences largely unreachable through Google-only strategies.
Companies considering Yango for mobility services in emerging markets face different calculations. The platform’s local partnerships and regulatory compliance offer advantages, though limited brand recognition compared to Uber or Didi requires additional marketing investment.
The Broader Lesson About Regional Tech Giants
Yandex’s international experience illustrates the challenges facing regional technology champions attempting global expansion. Success in a home market, even dominant success, doesn’t easily transfer to international contexts. The advantages that work domestically—language processing, local partnerships, government relationships—often become irrelevant or disadvantageous elsewhere.
The company’s partial success with Yango in Africa and Latin America suggests a different path: entering markets where Western tech giants haven’t yet established overwhelming dominance, partnering with local operators rather than trying to control everything, and focusing on services where network effects matter less than execution quality.
Whether this approach eventually leads to meaningful global scale remains unclear. What’s certain is that Yandex’s geographic footprint will continue reflecting the tension between ambitious international expansion and the practical realities of competing against the world’s most powerful technology platforms. For now, understanding Yandex’s ecosystem dominance in Russia requires recognizing both what the company achieved at home and what it hasn’t replicated abroad—and why both outcomes make sense given the constraints regional players face in an internet increasingly dominated by a handful of global giants.