Check weekly.

Yandex Webmaster is a free service through which the search engine tells the owner about problems with their site. Yandex accounts for about 70% of search in Russia, so what it says about your site is directly linked to leads. Yet many owners open Webmaster once every six months, when traffic has already dropped.

You don't have to understand every report. It is enough to spend 15–20 minutes once a week on a few sections to spot an error in time and not lose customers. Below is what exactly to look at and how to interpret what you see.

Why an owner should look at Webmaster

Webmaster shows what traffic analytics doesn't: which pages Yandex knows about, which it has dropped from search, which queries the site appears for, and whether it has any violations. Metrica answers the question "what are visitors doing", while Webmaster answers "why are there fewer or more of them".

Even if a contractor handles promotion, your own view is useful. You will notice faster that half the catalog disappeared from search after a programmer's changes, and you will be able to ask a specific question instead of a general "why did traffic drop". We collected the reasons a site loses rankings in the article on factors that reduce a site's visibility.

Diagnostics: where the check begins

The "Diagnostics" section is the first thing to open every week. Here Yandex collects the problems found on the site and sorts them by severity. The section was recently updated, and the messages have become clearer even without technical background.

Critical and possible problems

Critical errors require a response the same day: the site is unavailable, the home page returns an error, robots.txt blocks the site from indexing. Possible problems are less urgent but accumulate: no sitemap file, duplicate titles, slow server response. If you see a message and don't understand what it means, forward a screenshot to a specialist; it is faster than guessing.

Security and violations

This section shows information about malicious code, viruses and sanctions for violating search rules. An entry here is a reason to act immediately: if there is a security threat, Yandex may warn users in the search results, and clicks drop sharply. The normal state of this section is an empty list.

Indexing: which pages Yandex sees

Indexing shows how many of the site's pages take part in search and what is happening with the rest. Sharp changes in this section almost always mean a technical problem.

Pages in search

The chart of the number of pages in search should be flat or grow smoothly. A drop by a third within a week signals that something broke: URLs changed, indexing was blocked, the site was returning an error. New important pages, such as a new service or promotion, can be submitted through the "Reindex pages" tool to speed up their appearance in search.

Excluded pages

The list of excluded pages shows what Yandex has dropped and why: a duplicate, a page of insufficient quality, a redirect, a block in robots.txt. Some exclusions are normal: service URLs and filters are not needed in search results. It is worth being concerned if service or product pages that are supposed to sell are excluded.

Crawl statistics

This report shows how the robot crawls the site and which server responses it gets. If the number of errors grows, pages are unavailable or the server cannot handle the load. For large sites, configuring URL parameters is useful: it helps avoid wasting crawling on technical duplicates.

Search queries: which phrases people find you by

The queries section answers the most important question for a business: which phrases the site appears for and how many clicks it gets. Here you can see impressions, clicks, average position and click-through rate.

Query monitoring

Add 20–50 phrases that bring you customers to query monitoring. Data on them is now updated hourly, so a drop in position for an important query is visible the same day. Pay attention not to fluctuations of one or two places but to a steady decline over a week.

Page-level analytics

Advanced analytics shows queries broken down by specific URLs. This way you can see which page is responsible for which group of phrases and whether two pages compete for the same thing. If a blog article rather than the service page shows up in search for a query about your main service, that is a reason to refine the structure. A good service page, by the way, is also checked against commercial ranking factors.

Visibility in Alice's answers

Webmaster now has a report on the site's visibility in the answers of Alice, Yandex's assistant: it shows whether Yandex's neural network cites your pages. AI answers appear for about 42% of queries, and their sources are almost always taken from the top ten search results. This means that without strong positions in regular search, getting into an answer is almost impossible.

It is useful to look at this report at least once a week together with queries: if the site is often mentioned in answers but gets few clicks, people got their answer without visiting the site. We described how to deal with this user behavior in the article on zero-click search, and setting up a site for neural networks is handled by our promotion in neural networks practice.

What you can check less often

The other sections don't need weekly attention; it is enough to open them once a month or after major changes to the site:

• external links, to notice a sudden influx of suspicious donors;
• regional settings and organization details, after moving or opening a branch;
• sitemap files, after changing the site structure;
• IKS (Yandex's site quality index), for a general picture, since the indicator was recalculated in February 2026 and does not affect rankings.

IndexNow deserves a separate mention: if the site supports this protocol, new and updated pages get into Yandex faster without manual submission.

A 15-minute check routine

It is convenient to go through the weekly check in the same order every time; then it takes a quarter of an hour:

1. Open "Diagnostics" and the security section and make sure there are no new critical problems.
2. Look at the chart of pages in search and the list of recent exclusions.
3. Check crawl statistics for a rise in server errors.
4. Go through query monitoring and note steady declines.
5. Look at the report on visibility in Alice's answers.
6. Record what you noticed in a spreadsheet and send questions to the contractor.

Notes matter more than they seem. A few months later, they make it easy to find the moment changes began and link it to edits on the site.

When it is time to call a specialist

Webmaster shows the problem but does not always suggest a solution. Recurring indexing errors, falling queries for no visible reason, sanctions or a site migration are tasks that need an experienced SEO specialist. In such cases, website SEO optimization starts with an audit, not with fixing a single message.

If you decide to order SEO promotion, ask the contractor to show reports straight from Webmaster. Good SEO services are transparent: you can see which pages were added to search and for which phrases rankings grew. The price of SEO promotion should be explained by the scope of tasks, not by promises. The same goes for calculating the price of website SEO optimization: ask for an itemized estimate. Before you order SEO promotion for your site, set goals in terms of leads and revenue.

For one-off help, you can order SEO optimization of individual sections, for example to fix indexing errors. If you have decided to order full-scale SEO optimization, ongoing work is the right fit: website SEO promotion delivers results only when technical work and content go together. SEO promotion and SEO optimization for companies in Moscow and across Russia is our team's core work, and our SEO optimization always starts with an analysis of search data.

If you want to order SEO, or SEO for your site with ongoing support, the epic name. team will analyze your Webmaster data and propose a plan. Leave a request on the SEO promotion page: you can order SEO optimization of your site after we assess its current state.