Yandex LLC
Headquartered in Russia, Yandex has historically been the country’s leading search engine, offering a wide range of services, including email, cloud storage, maps, and ride-hailing. As of the end of 2024, Yandex Search held approximately 74% of Russia’s search engine market share, with Google maintaining a significantly lower share at around 24%. Advertising has traditionally been the primary revenue driver for Yandex.
Yandex’s performance in the 2025 RDR Index reflects long-standing concerns, including its lack of transparency on key issues, as well as its failure to resist government requests and influence. Despite improvements in transparency regarding advertisement labeling, the company continued to underperform in crucial areas, particularly with respect to content moderation, policy enforcement, and security practices. Yandex shared only limited disclosures on government content takedown requests. Further, its failure to report on data breaches raised concerns over its security practices.
The company underwent significant restructuring in 2024. In February, Yandex N.V., the Dutch parent company of Yandex, sold its Russian business to a consortium of Russian investors for approximately USD 5.4 billion. Following this sale, Yandex N.V. no longer owns or controls the Yandex brand in Russia and has rebranded itself as Nebius Group as of July 2024. Nebius Group is now headquartered in Amsterdam and focuses on AI and cloud computing.
In March 2024, the EU lifted sanctions against Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh. Volozh had been living in exile, during which he publicly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He subsequently returned as CEO of the Nebius Group, having severed all Russian ties.
The Russian operations of Yandex are now under the ownership of IJSC Yandex, an international joint-stock company incorporated in Russia and legally headquartered in Kaliningrad. The sale of Yandex, Russia’s biggest tech giant, has potentially strengthened the Russian government’s control over the company. Independent Russian media outlets reported that at least some of the shareholders are acting as intermediaries for individuals under sanctions such as Yury Kovalchuk, a powerful shareholder of VK and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Within this context, Yandex faced growing international and national scrutiny. In 2023, the Latvian government blocked access to all Yandex services, claiming content on the company’s platforms contained “distorted and false” information about events such as the war in Ukraine. The governments of Finland and Norway took similar actions. Both countries prohibited Yandex from transferring user data collected through its Yango ride-hailing service to Russia, citing new Russian legislation allowing the Federal Security Service (FSB) to access such data. Yandex has also faced fines from Russian authorities for refusing to share user data with the FSB. Yandex came under increasing pressure to align its AI technologies with government interests. This was made clear when former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev criticized Yandex’s AI chatbot for avoiding politically sensitive questions, further emphasizing the state’s growing influence over digital platforms.
The 2025 RDR Index: Big Tech Edition covers policies that were active on August 1, 2024. Policies that came into effect after August 1, 2024, were not evaluated for this benchmark.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
Yandex did not make any progress in governance since 2022, though it performed better in this category than its Russian peer VK. The company once again failed to provide information about how it oversees issues affecting users’ freedom of expression. While it disclosed that it conducts data protection impact assessments, these processes still did not appear to cover issues beyond data protection (G4a). For the third time in a row, we found no evidence that the company assesses privacy, freedom of expression, or discrimination risks that could result from its policy enforcement, targeted advertising policies and practices, or development and deployment of algorithms (G4b–d).
Yandex ranked seventh in the freedom of expression category once again, despite a few improvements. Although the company began reporting on some government content removal requests (F6), it continued to fall short on providing full transparency regarding censorship demands and content moderation enforcement. In the past, Yandex’s transparency report did not disclose if the company removed any content or links based on government requests. In its updated 2023 transparency report, Yandex began disclosing data on government demands to restrict content. Nevertheless, the company continued to withhold critical information, such as compliance rates with such demands.
Yandex ranked eighth in the privacy category, showing more robust transparency than its Russian peer VK. The company expanded its disclosures on how it collects and processes user data, including through third-party tracking (P3, P4). However, it failed to provide basic information on how it handles user data, including what options users have to control the use of their data for the development of algorithmic systems (P7). The company’s decision to stop reporting on data breaches further weakened its privacy protection (P15).