Baidu, the leading searching engine in China

Baidu is the most used search engine by Chinese Internet users every day, more than 900 million Baidu users

But what is the engine behind the slogan “A stroke of Baidu and you will know everything! »

Baidu, often referred to as the “Google of China,” remains the dominant search engine in China as of 2024. Its popularity and effectiveness are sustained by comprehensive search services that cater specifically to Chinese language users. Alongside its core search engine, Baidu operates several other websites including:

Baidu Baike: An online encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia.
Baidu Tieba: A vast forum platform based on keyword searches.
Baidu Wenku: A comprehensive resource for finding documents.
Baidu Music: A streaming service that offers a wide range of music.
Baidu Map: A detailed mapping service similar to Google Maps.

These platforms together create a robust ecosystem that integrates search, social media, knowledge sharing, music streaming, and geographical navigation services, maintaining Baidu’s status as a tech giant in the Chinese internet space.

All SEOs know Baidu without really knowing it because they ignore the most important point: in most European countries and the USA, natural search traffic is the first lever because the two dominant search engines (especially Google and Bing / Yahoo to a lesser extent) are promoting outgoing natural links to other sites. If the share of PPC was higher, SEO would be a less powerful lever and especially if the results pointed towards search engine’s content, SEO would lose much importance.

Baidu promotes internal group results and lets out little traffic.

Consequence of this: SEO is a much less powerful lever and acquisition strategies are focused on other lever. Thus, the marketplace Tmall, unique in the world, captures over 60% of Chinese ecommerce by itself and realizes itself, more than the turnover of all the US E-Commerce ($ 278 billion against $ 250 billion). In China, it is mainly about the place of Tmall market you have to be well referenced and not on Baidu SEO.

Baidu is the largest Chinese search engine, but not the largest provider of traffic and customers.

But in China, everything goes very fast: between 2012 and 2013, the market share of its young Soso.com competitor would be increased from 2% to 10% of the market according to some studies.

Baidu’s homepage

On Baidu’s homepage you can have a sneak peek of the services provided by the search engine such as the News, the Forum, Zhidao (Wikipedia like platform), Music and Video download, Images, Help Center, Advanced research, Personal space (Something similar to MSN Spaces). You can also turn Baidu as your homepage, have a look at the top researches made in a certain period. Then you have the classical ‘About Us’ interface and the imprints. Finally, directly from the homepage you can access to the Jingjia service, which a service equivalent to Google Adwords).

The first page of the keyword « Bread »

On this page you have, the website’s title and its description, nothing unusual for the moment.. What is different are the top 10 results, they are usually labelled as “Promotional Content” (推广) next to the site’s URL. This is the Jingjia service of Baidu called PPC (Pay per Click) or P4P (Pay for Performance).

If you’re not satisfied, at the bottom of the page are found various keywords, given as suggestions. When click on one of these, a new research is searched. If you click on “more alternatives”, you will have access to a list of the 100 most searched keywords. And if it is not enough precise for you, you can make a research within the research.

« The Hot Zone » (火爆地带) is the zone on the right side of the screen and is where announces are displayed according to your research. You can also have a look on the price of these announces.

The keyword you’ve searched for is marked in red in all the results, on Google the keyword is written in bold.

Advanced search

Baidu is able to locate a certain type site with the “Advanced Search” function, the user can determine geographically among 34 provinces and cities, including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Linguistically, the user has the choice between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, which generally mark the difference between the sites in Taiwan, Hong Kong and those in mainland China.

Baidu Jingjia (百度竟价) – A media platform dedicated to webmarketers, P4P

This is the advertising system of the search engine Baidu that displays targeted text ads. Advertisers pay when a user clicks on the advertisement as an auction system: the higher the price per click is, the higher the ad is shown. If there is no click, the advertiser pays no advertising costs, it’s a department P4P (pay for performance). Since 11 September 2006, Baidu has added the “intelligent ranking” function to improve the old model in which the price of the keyword was the only factor taken into account for the classification of commercial links. Now, the overall ranking indicator includes not only the price per click, but also the quality of the advertisement. Those considered more relevant by netizens have higher rankings than others.

The procedure of the service

When you subscribe to a Jingjia account, you can submit an unlimited amount of keywords. There is a 2400 Yuans of credit to draft (minimum), if you don’t pay, your account and all of the announces’ information will automatically be deleted after 30 days.

Baidu verifiy the subscription’ infos et and the keywords within 2 days after receiving the payment. If abnormal operation or lack of site content, Baidu will stop the service temporarily. The keywords are effective as soon as they are checked and confirmed. Clicking the ad is 0.30 yuan (equal to about 3 cents).

The « Hot Zone » (火爆地带)

Baidu named the commercial links box on the right of the first page of search results, the “Hot Zone”. It is a measure of promotions targeted to specific keywords purchased by advertisers who pay according to the time and the number of clicks.

The presentation

There are up to 10 ads in the Hot Zone, The results are fixed in relation to keywords that appear in red. The ad does not appear if the keyword is not the one that is bought by the advertiser. The title includes ideograms maximum 12 and 30 in the descriptions.

The ranking is determined according to the will of the advertiser and of the auction. For example, the advertiser decides that the key word “Bread” appears in 3rd place in the Hot Zone, if the 2nd place is not yet sold, the ad will automatically appear on the 2nd place and it will fall on the 3rd when the second is taken. And if the place is already taken, the advertiser must wait for the expiry of that place to buy it. The top three spots are fixed. The 4th to 10th ad appear in turn. The rankings do not change in the same day.

Pricing and conditions

The price is fixed in relation to the different level of Hot Zone and the popularity of the keyword. We distinguish between hot words, popular words and common words. The user can check the price of each keyword at any time. The duration of the ad is one year, we can extend the contract three months before expiration. Below 30 days, it is impossible to extend.

Price examples:

English words	Chinese words	Prices from the 1st to the 3rd place	Price from the 4th to the 10th place
Cosmetics	美容品	560 $ /an	400 $ /an
Make Up	化妆品	10 620 $ /an	7 585 $ /an
Care	护理	706 $ /an	502 $ /an
Perfume	香水	2406 $ /an	1722 $ /an
Museum	博物馆	560 $ /an	400 $ /an
Brand	品牌	1312 $ /an	935 $ /an
Communication	公关	558 $ /an	400 $ /an
Advertising Agency	广告代理	558 $ /an	400 $ /an

Baidu Spider

Like Googlebot and MSNbot, Baidu Spider is a crawler that automatically explores the Chinese sites.

SEO Software

Baidu Keyword Analyzer 1.0

Baidu Keyword Analyzer 2.0

Other searching engine :

Chine (Mainland):

www.soso.com
ww.sogou.com
http://www.haosou.com

Baidu has become the leading search engine in China

What is the best SEO baidu Agency in China ?

GMA is known as the best SEO agency in China for Baidu, An online marketing company based in China founded in 2011 providing efficient Baidu SEO searvice and Baidu PPC

The 2026 market reality: what the data shows

Baidu remains the dominant search engine in China. As of late 2025, it held a 63.97% share across all devices, rising from 45.15% in December 2024, a gain of nearly 20 percentage points in twelve months, according to StatCounter data compiled by The Egg. On mobile, that share climbs to 77.86%, which matters because China had 1.30 billion internet users at the end of 2025, with mobile accounting for the vast majority of sessions. China’s government statistics confirm 1.125 billion internet users as of end-2025, with the internet penetration rate at 80.1%. Baidu’s Q1 2026 revenue hit RMB 32.08 billion (approximately $4.54 billion), beating analyst estimates, and its AI-powered business exceeded half of core revenue for the first time, per Baidu’s SEC filings. Any foreign brand targeting Chinese consumers that ignores Baidu is ignoring the single largest gateway to over a billion online users.

How Baidu’s algorithm works in 2026, and what foreign brands get wrong

Baidu’s ranking algorithm shares surface-level similarities with Google, but the differences are significant enough to sink campaigns built on the wrong assumptions.

The most common mistake foreign brands make is treating Baidu SEO as a translation exercise. They take their existing English-language pages, run them through a translation tool, and expect results. Baidu does not reward that approach. Its algorithm weighs simplified Chinese content heavily, and it can distinguish between properly localized Chinese copy and machine-translated text that lacks natural keyword patterns used by actual Chinese users.

Hosting location is a technical factor that has no equivalent in Western SEO. Baidu gives ranking preference to websites hosted on mainland Chinese servers. Sites hosted outside China load slowly due to the Great Firewall’s filtering layer, and Baidu penalizes slow load times. The target is under 1.5 seconds. If you host in Hong Kong, Singapore, or the US, you need a CDN with mainland China Points of Presence to get close to that threshold.

ICP licensing is non-negotiable. An ICP (Internet Content Provider) license is a permit issued by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Without one, your website can be blocked or deprioritized in Baidu’s index. Many foreign brands skip this step because it requires a Chinese business entity, and then wonder why their site gets no organic traction. The licensing process takes four to eight weeks on average and needs a local company registration as a prerequisite.

Beyond hosting and licensing, Baidu’s algorithm in 2026 places significant weight on its own ecosystem. Pages that appear in Baidu Baike (the Chinese Wikipedia equivalent), Baidu Zhidao (Q&A), and Baidu Tieba (forums) carry trust signals that influence how the main search index ranks your standalone website. A brand with strong presence across these properties consistently outranks a brand that only optimizes its own domain. Meta keywords and meta descriptions also carry more weight on Baidu than on Google, where they are largely ignored. Title tag keyword alignment, internal linking structure, and domain age all factor in more directly here than in Western SEO practice.

The shift from backlink quantity to domain trust is the most important algorithmic change from the past two years. Baidu now focuses on the relevance and authority of linking domains rather than raw link counts. Building dozens of low-quality directory links, a tactic that worked on early Baidu, now triggers quality filters rather than ranking gains.

Baidu advertising: paid search and the AI-native marketing shift

Paid search on Baidu, called Baidu Tuiguang or Baidu PPC, operates on a cost-per-click model similar to Google Ads. Advertisers bid on keywords, ads appear at the top of results pages, and you pay when users click. The mechanics are familiar. The execution is different.

First, ad copy must be written in simplified Chinese and comply with China’s advertising law, which restricts superlatives (“best,” “number one”), requires substantiated claims, and prohibits certain categories of content outright. Pharmaceutical, financial, and education advertisers face additional pre-approval requirements before ads can run.

Second, Baidu’s feed ads have grown as a revenue driver alongside traditional search ads. These appear in the Baidu app’s information feed, not only on search results pages, and they use behavioral targeting rather than keyword intent. For brand awareness campaigns, feed placements often deliver lower CPCs than search placements in competitive categories.

The bigger story in 2025 and 2026 is Baidu’s push into AI-native marketing. Baidu launched AI Overview, an AI-generated answer layer that sits above traditional search results, at the start of 2025. This is directly comparable to Google’s AI Overviews in the US. For advertisers, it means that some queries now return an AI-generated summary before any organic or paid links appear. Baidu has introduced sponsored placements within these AI summaries, creating a new ad format that brands need to account for in their media plans.

Baidu’s ERNIE model handles approximately 1.65 billion API calls per day, based on December 2024 figures from Baidu’s own filings. ERNIE-powered answers are increasingly present in search results across commercial categories. A brand that is not optimizing its content to be cited inside AI-generated answers is missing a growing portion of search visibility. The approach is similar to GEO (generative engine optimization): structured content, clear factual claims, and authoritative sourcing increase the probability that ERNIE pulls from your pages when generating answers.

For context, Volkswagen’s China digital marketing team publicly cited Baidu’s AI ad placements as a test channel for their 2025 launch of updated EV models in China, using both keyword ads and AI-integrated display to cover different stages of the purchase funnel. That kind of integrated approach, pairing traditional PPC with the new AI-layer placements, is becoming standard practice for major brands operating in China.

What changed between 2024 and 2026

The two years between early 2024 and mid-2026 brought more change to Baidu’s position than the previous five years combined.

In December 2024, Baidu’s overall search market share sat at 45.15%. By November 2025 it had climbed to 63.97%, per StatCounter. The trigger was AI Overview, launched in early 2025, which drew users back to Baidu who had drifted toward social search on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. AI-powered answers gave Baidu a reason to be the first stop again for information queries.

Bing lost more than 20 percentage points in the same period, dropping from 37.74% to 15.97%. That reversal reflects how directly AI features shifted user preference rather than organic growth.

On the regulatory side, China’s Cyberspace Administration tightened rules around AI-generated content (AIGC) in 2025, requiring platforms to label AI-generated search answers. Baidu complied. This created a new content credibility dynamic: brands whose owned content gets cited within labeled AI answers benefit from the authority of being a source, rather than being displaced by the AI layer.

Search engine users in China reached 777 million as of June 2025, representing 69.2% of all internet users, according to CNNIC’s 55th Statistical Report. CNNIC also identified search as a “black horse” growth sector, driven by AI reasoning model integration. Generative AI users in China numbered 602 million by December 2025, up 141.7% from end-2024. For SEO and paid search strategy, this means user behavior is changing faster than most campaign calendars account for.

Frequently asked questions

Does Baidu still dominate China’s search market in 2026?

Yes. Baidu held 63.97% of China’s search market across all devices as of November 2025, up from 45.15% a year earlier. On mobile, the share reaches 77.86%. The recovery was driven by Baidu’s launch of AI Overview in early 2025, which brought users back from social search platforms. Bing, the second-largest search engine in China, fell to 15.97% market share over the same period. No other search engine comes close to challenging Baidu’s position for commercial and informational search queries. For any brand targeting Chinese consumers online, Baidu remains the primary search channel to optimize and advertise on.

Can a foreign brand rank on Baidu without a Chinese entity?

It is possible to appear in Baidu results without a Chinese entity, but the ceiling is low. Without an ICP license, your site may face indexing limitations or intermittent blocking. Without mainland China hosting or a mainland CDN, page load speeds will often exceed the 1.5-second threshold Baidu uses as a ranking signal. You can run some Baidu paid ads through a third-party licensed advertising agency without having a Chinese entity yourself, which is a common route for foreign brands at an early stage. But for serious organic performance, the combination of ICP licensing, local hosting, simplified Chinese content, and Baidu ecosystem presence requires a more committed local setup. Most brands that scale China search revenue establish a WFOE or work through a local partner with the required licenses.

What is Baidu AI Overview and how does it affect SEO?

Baidu AI Overview is an AI-generated answer block that appears above traditional search results for many queries. It uses Baidu’s ERNIE large language model to synthesize an answer from multiple sources. For SEO, this means some queries no longer deliver clicks directly to organic links in the traditional sense. Instead, the AI answer absorbs the top of the page. The practical implication: content that is well-structured, factually clear, and from a domain Baidu trusts is more likely to be cited inside the AI answer, which drives brand visibility even if the click goes to Baidu’s interface rather than your site. Optimizing for AI citation, often called GEO, is becoming a required layer of any Baidu content strategy in 2026.

How does Baidu advertising differ from Google Ads?

Both platforms use keyword-based bidding and cost-per-click pricing, but the differences in execution are significant. Baidu requires all ad accounts to be verified with Chinese business credentials or run through an authorized reseller. Ad copy must comply with China’s advertising law, which bans certain superlatives and imposes category-specific restrictions on industries like healthcare, finance, and education. Baidu’s ad interface is primarily in Chinese, and account management is done through Baidu’s own platform (Baidu Tuiguang). Keyword research must use Chinese search volume data, not Google Keyword Planner data, as search intent and language patterns differ substantially. Baidu also offers feed placements, brand zone takeovers, and now AI-layer sponsored positions, giving advertisers more format options than pure search ads.

How to move forward

Start with the technical foundation. Secure your ICP license, host your site on a mainland China server or a CDN with mainland nodes, and get your page load time below 1.5 seconds inside China. Without those three elements in place, spending on content or ads produces weaker results than it should.

Write content in simplified Chinese, not translated English. Use keyword research tools that pull Baidu-specific search volume data. Build presence across Baidu’s own properties: a Baike entry, Zhidao answers, and relevant Tieba participation all send trust signals to the main index.

For paid search, work with an agency that holds a Baidu authorized reseller license. This lets you run campaigns without a Chinese entity and gives you access to proper account management and billing. Combine keyword ads with feed placements to cover both intent-driven and interest-driven audiences.

If you want professional support on the SEO side, the team at SEO Agency China runs Baidu optimization campaigns for foreign brands, covering technical setup, content production, and link building. For paid search, Baidu advertising services include account setup, creative compliance, and ongoing bid management. If you want to discuss your specific situation, reach out here and the team will come back to you within one business day.

Marcus Zhan is a China marketing specialist based in Shanghai. He covers digital marketing, consumer trends, and brand strategy for the Chinese market. Connect with him on LinkedIn to discuss your Baidu strategy.

Sources: The Egg, Most Popular Search Engines in China (StatCounter data, Nov 2025) | CNNIC, 55th Statistical Report on China Internet Development (2025) | China Government, Internet User Statistics End-2025 (Feb 2026) | Baidu Inc, Form 6-K Q1 2026 Financial Results (SEC Filing) | Comms8, Baidu SEO in 2026: Essential Guide for Foreign Brands