Japanese search & AI visibility
Built inJapanese,not translated.
For the people deciding whether to enter Japan — and for the ones already there, wondering why the traffic never arrived.
The premise
Translated content rarely ranks in Japan. Query patterns, search intent and the signals that earn trust are all local.
That single fact explains most of what goes wrong for foreign companies here. The keyword list was written in English and translated. The article reads correctly and answers a question nobody in Japan asked. Six months later the traffic has not moved, and the diagnosis is “Japan is difficult”.
Japan is not difficult. It is specific. This site documents the specifics — with dates, sources, and numbers we can show.
What most guides still get wrong
Yahoo! JAPAN has its own ranking algorithm, so you have to optimize for it separately.
Yahoo! JAPAN’s organic results come from Google’s index, and have since 2010. There is no second algorithm. What differs is the layout of the results page.
Contract runs to 31 March 2027List your business on Yahoo! JAPAN Local.
Yahoo!ロコ shut down. The tool that replaced it is Yahoo!プレイス, and it is still free.
Service ended 27 March 2024Google holds about 80% of Japanese search, Yahoo! about 9%.
Statcounter put Google at 59.7% and Bing at 32.1% for Japan in July 2026. Sources disagree, and most articles are still quoting 2024 figures. Check the date on any number — including ours.
Statcounter, July 2026Start here
Japan Market-Entry SEO
Domain choice, Japanese keyword research, native production, trust signals and measurement — the whole sequence, in order.Google vs. Yahoo! JAPAN
One index, two front doors. What actually differs in 2026, and what the contract date means for anyone planning past next spring.Writing Japanese content that ranks
Why flawless translation still fails, examined at the level of the brief, the outline and the sentence.Is content SEO worth it in Japan?
What it costs, how long it takes, and the cases where the honest answer is that you should not do it at all.Latest articles
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What gets covered
The search landscape
Which engines Japan actually uses, whose index sits underneath each one, and why the published market-share figures disagree with each other.
Language and intent
Keyword research done in Japanese, script variants treated as separate terms, and the gap between ranking and being chosen.
Trust signals
What Japanese readers need before they believe a claim: named authorship, professional supervision, dated sources.
AI visibility
AI Overviews have been live in Japanese since August 2024. Being cited is a separate outcome from ranking, and it is measurable.
By the numbers
About
Published by Amanaut, Inc., a Japanese content and SEO company founded in 2019.
Written and edited by Hiroki Tanaka, the founder. Everything is produced natively in Japanese — research, writing, and the structured data underneath it. We measure two things: where you rank, and whether Japanese AI assistants name you.
This site is also our own experiment. We recorded the baseline before changing anything, we publish what we change, and we report what happened — including when it did not work.
Updated September 2026 · Figures carry the date they were checked