What did I do to Yandex for my smart speakers to spam them this hard?

I have 3 Yandex Alice smart speakers on my network, and Pi-hole is showing something pretty ridiculous.

Each of them is generating tens of thousands of requests (~50-70k) to Yandex domains.

The funny part: I barely used the speakers during the last week. Maybe asked Alice a couple of times to turn a smart plug on/off. Otherwise they were just sitting idle.

Before adding these Yandex domains to my blocklists, my Pi-hole blocking rate was around 13%. Now it's 44%.

Everything still seems to work normally, so… what exactly are these speakers trying to send/check so aggressively while idle? Is this normal behavior for Alice devices, or has anyone investigated this traffic more deeply?

Screenshots attached: the three IPs in the second one are the three speakers.

UPD: A kind Redditor suggested that the speakers might be aggressively retrying the phone-home domain because Pi-hole was returning a blocked/unresolved response. I replaced the block for clck yandex net with a local DNS record pointing to an unused local IP instead.

It worked surprisingly well: over the same 5-minute window, the speakers went from 170+ DNS requests to about 50. Almost a 4x reduction in request volume!!!

I’ll attach screenshots with the before/after results in the comments.