AEO in China: 10 Ways to Get Your Brand Cited by DeepSeek

Ask DeepSeek an open question about a product category and count the brands in the answer. You will get between two and seven. That is the number Chinese AI monitoring firms keep reporting, and it is the whole problem in one figure. A Baidu results page gives you ten blue links and a second page. An answer engine gives you a shortlist. If your brand is not on it, you were not beaten, you were never in the room.

That shift has a name now: Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. In China it usually travels under the label GEO, 生成式引擎优化, and it has moved fast from a consultant buzzword to a line in real marketing budgets. This article explains how being cited actually works inside a Chinese answer engine, then gives you ten things you can do about it, in the order I would do them.

What changed in China in 2026

• GEO stopped being optional and became a budget line. Chinese industry coverage now puts the domestic GEO market in the billions of RMB with annual growth above 100 percent. Two years ago it was a handful of agencies arguing about definitions.
• China wrote the first rulebook. The standard T/CAPT 026-2026 was published on 11 August 2026 and took effect the next day. It draws a formal line between white-hat and black-hat GEO, and bans content poisoning, fabricated consensus and prompt injection. We covered it in detail in our piece on the GEO trust standard.
• The standard tells you how to organise your own content. Its central mechanism, three-zone separation, requires brands to keep a fact library, an opinion library and a marketing library apart, and to make every factual claim in marketing trace back to the fact library version. That is a content architecture instruction, not just a compliance one.
• Not all publishing platforms carry the same weight. Chinese practitioners consistently report that deep-content platforms like Zhihu and CSDN are over-represented in model training corpora compared with pure news sites. Where you publish now matters as much as what you publish.
• Monitoring became a discipline of its own. The working method in China is a question matrix run across several engines at once: DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi, Tongyi Qianwen, Tencent Yuanbao. You test category questions, need questions, scenario questions, brand questions and comparison questions, then track how often you appear.

How a brand actually gets cited: ten things that work

Whether DeepSeek names you depends on three things stacking up: your content sitting in the training data, your pages being retrievable when the model reaches out live, and your claims being verifiable enough that citing you is not a risk. Everything below serves one of those three.

1. Build the fact library first. List every factual claim you make in China: certifications, capacities, dates, market positions, test results. Attach a source to each one. Anything with no source is marketing language, and it needs to be labelled as such rather than presented as fact. This is the foundation the Chinese standard now asks for, and it is also what makes a model comfortable quoting you.
2. Answer the question in the first two sentences. Models extract passages, they do not read your build-up. Put the answer at the top of the section, then explain. A page that opens with three paragraphs of context before the point gets skipped.
3. Write in the four intent shapes Chinese buyers actually use. For each core topic, cover the question form, the recommendation form, the comparison form and the geographic form. “What is X”, “best X for Y”, “X versus Z”, “X supplier in Shanghai”. Most foreign brands only ever produce the first one.
4. Publish where the models read. Your own site is necessary but not sufficient. Zhihu and Baijiahao carry disproportionate weight in Chinese model corpora. A technically strong answer on Zhihu can do more for citation than the same text on your blog.
5. Attach numbers to claims, with the source visible. Chinese practitioners report that content labelled with concrete structured data gets picked up markedly more often than the same content written qualitatively. “Top 3 global market share” with a source beats “a global leader” every time.
6. Build the semantic chain: problem, solution, verification. A page that states a problem, gives a solution and then shows evidence for it maps cleanly onto how a model assembles an answer. A page that only does one of the three is hard to cite.
7. Use FAQ structure and structured data on your own pages. Question-and-answer formatting is the closest thing to a native format for an answer engine. If your page is already shaped like an answer, less has to be inferred.
8. Get corroborated somewhere you do not control. Models weight claims that appear in more than one place. Industry media, a directory, a partner site, an interview. A fact that exists only on your own domain is a fact with one witness.
9. Stay on the white-hat side of the line. Content poisoning, fake consensus and prompt injection are now named and banned in the Chinese standard. They also work badly and briefly. Any provider selling you guaranteed AI citations without explaining the mechanism is selling one of these.
10. Measure mention rate, not traffic. Run your question matrix every two weeks across the main Chinese engines and record whether you appear, in what position, and with what framing. AEO does not produce a clean traffic line in analytics. If you measure it like SEO, you will conclude it does nothing.

What the Chinese market is reporting

Hard published cases are still thin, and I want to be straight about the quality of what exists. The numbers circulating in China come mostly from GEO providers writing about their own work, and they anonymise their clients. Treat them as directional, not as audited results.

With that caveat, the pattern is consistent. Chinese providers report that structuring a brand’s knowledge assets lifts citation rates in AI answers by roughly 28 to 35 percent on average. One case describes a photovoltaic manufacturer that labelled its content with concrete structured claims, global market share position and a shipment growth figure, and saw its citation frequency rise sharply. Another describes a study abroad institution reporting a large increase in course enquiries attributed to DeepSeek, and a medical device company reporting a visibility gain on the same engine. A detailed Chinese walkthrough of the method is published on NetEase.

What I can tell you from our own work is narrower but first hand. On a skincare importer whose product page was built entirely of adjectives, premium, clinically proven, trusted by dermatologists, none of them attached to a certificate or a study, we rebuilt the page around a sourced fact block: which lab, which registration, which date. DeepSeek began naming the brand in comparison answers within about six weeks. Nothing about the product changed. What changed is that there was finally something safe to quote.

How we run AEO for foreign brands

We are a team of fifteen in Jing’an, Shanghai. AEO is not a separate product we bolted on, it sits on the same work as Baidu SEO, because the inputs are the same: Chinese-language content that is structured, sourced and published where it counts.

Concretely, here is what we do on an AEO engagement. We start with a baseline: a question matrix built around your category, run across DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi and Tongyi Qianwen, so you know what the engines currently say when a buyer asks about your product type. Most of the time the honest answer is that they say nothing about you, and it is better to see that on paper. Then we build the fact library with your team, because you are the only ones who have the certificates and the real numbers. We write the Chinese content, in the four intent shapes, and we place it on your site and on the Chinese platforms that carry weight in model corpora. Then we re-run the matrix every two weeks and report movement in mention rate.

Why this needs someone local: the fact library has to be written in Chinese by people who know how a Chinese buyer phrases the question, the publishing platforms need real accounts with real verification, and the compliance line drawn by the new standard is written in Chinese and enforced in China. A foreign team working in translation will produce content that is technically accurate and phrased in a way nobody searches.

One thing we will not do is promise you a citation. Nobody can. Model outputs vary between runs, and any agency guaranteeing a fixed position in an AI answer is describing manipulation, which the standard now names. What we commit to is the mechanism and the measurement: your facts become verifiable, your content becomes extractable, your presence becomes trackable. If after three months the mention rate has not moved, you will see that in the report rather than hear about impressions.

If you want to see where you stand before committing to anything, the baseline question matrix is worth running on its own. It takes us a few days and it tells you whether this is urgent for your category or whether you have another year. Our practical guide to appearing in DeepSeek answers covers the citation side in more detail if you want to read further first.

Where to start

AEO in China is early enough that the work is cheap and the position is available, and late enough that the first movers in several categories have already taken their spot. The brands that build a real fact library this year will be the ones the engines quote next year, because there will be nothing else safe to quote.

Ask us for a free AI visibility audit and we will run the question matrix on your category across the main Chinese engines, and send you what they say about you today.

About Jon Wang

Jon Wang is the founder of SEO Agency China, a fifteen-person team in Jing’an, Shanghai. He came up through food and distribution, the categories where a brand either gets found and reordered or disappears, and he built the agency for companies with a real product and a budget that has to earn its keep. He takes the founder calls himself. Connect with Jon on LinkedIn.

Sources

• DeepSeek – the engine itself, and its published model documentation.
• NetEase (网易) – Chinese walkthrough of GEO method and reported provider cases, 2026.
• CAICT white papers (中国信通院) – the state research body publishing on AI and the digital economy.
• CNNIC Statistical Report on Internet Development – the reference count for Chinese internet and AI tool adoption.