Alisa from Yandex reduces the world to ten websites

Yandex's artificial intelligence assistant, Alisa, has changed its search behavior. It now almost exclusively consults sites that appear among the top ten results, ignoring the rest. This has reduced references to less popular pages by four times. For the average user, finding information from small or alternative sources has become more complicated, limiting the diversity of content available on the web and favoring large portals.

Isometric technical illustration showing a glowing globe-shaped web network, ten oversized portal icons dominating the center while dozens of smaller websites fade into gray shadow at the edges, a stylized robot hand with Yandex branding reaching only toward the top ten bright nodes, leaving the dimmed smaller sites untouched, digital connection lines breaking and dissolving from ignored pages, cinematic engineering visualization with metallic blue and orange interface lighting, translucent data streams flowing exclusively into the large portals, photorealistic 3D render, dramatic contrast between illuminated major sites and darkened minor ones, clean geometric composition

The algorithm that prioritizes the popular 🤖

From a technical standpoint, this change involves an adjustment in the weights of the language model that Alisa uses. By restricting sources to the top 10 results, the assistant reduces computational load and speeds up responses. However, this sacrifices the depth of data crawling. The artificial intelligence no longer evaluates a site's relevance by its content, but by its position in the search ranking. This creates a bias where pages with less traffic or a lower SEO budget become invisible to most users.

The internet of the rich, for the rich 💰

So now you know: if your grandma's recipe blog or your crafts store doesn't appear on the first page of Yandex, Alisa won't even know they exist. It's as if the AI has decided that what isn't popular doesn't deserve to be seen. Soon we will only read news from large corporations and watch cat videos from official channels. Good thing artificial intelligence saves us from the hassle of having to choose.