YandexSystemConfirmed
Yandex YATI
Transformer-based relevance model that Yandex described as its biggest ranking improvement in ten years.
What changed
YATI, or Yet Another Transformer with Improvements, applied transformer architectures to matching queries against documents, analogous in role to Google's BERT deployment. Yandex said it produced the largest single relevance gain in a decade for Russian-language search. It shifted Russian-market SEO toward semantic coverage and away from exact keyword matching. Only the month of announcement is documented here.
Timing
Rollout began 1 November 2020. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.