SEO in China: How Baidu, WeChat and AI Search Work

A few weeks ago I was in China myself, in Hangzhou, and came back with a lot of questions. How do you find a business there when Google plays no role? And how do you optimize for Baidu, WeChat and the Chinese AI assistants? That is exactly what I talked about with Marcus Pentzek. Marcus has lived in China again for almost four years and, as a partner at Jademond Digital, mostly supports European B2B companies that want to be found in China.

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How Marcus ended up in China

Marcus never planned to move to China. He pictured the country as a kind of Asian GDR. Then he met his wife online, who was living in Beijing, and he moved there in 2012.

His first job was at an e-commerce company in Beijing. The firm helped customers from abroad buy on Taobao. The merchants there only spoke Chinese, only accepted Chinese payment methods and did not ship abroad. Marcus ran the marketing for the customers outside China.

Because of the bad air in Beijing, the family moved back to Germany after two years. There Marcus worked as an SEO consultant for around ten years, among others at UDG and Searchmetrics. Everyone knew he came from China, so the China requests landed on his desk even then. Today he runs the Jademond office in Tianjin, his wife's hometown.

"We didn't come to Germany because we wanted to be in Germany. We wanted to escape the bad air." (Marcus)

What impressed me: the air is much better today. Marcus compares it to Germany in the 80s, when the Rhine still had no fish.

Who comes to Jademond

The agency has around 40 employees, about ten of them working on SEO and GEO. The others handle social media, PPC and marketplaces like Taobao, Tmall and JD.

Most clients are foreign B2B companies, many of them from Germany. They sell machines, machine parts, lab equipment or services. There is also the opposite direction: Chinese B2C sellers who want to build their own website out of their Amazon business. According to Marcus, two marketing cultures often collide there, because many believe you can simply buy 10,000 backlinks and be done.

The typical mistake when entering the market

The classic German client arrives with a simple idea: a lot of revenue runs through Google, so we translate the website into Chinese, put /cn next to /en, and the agency does SEO on top.

Marcus then first has to explain how the market works. That usually includes:

• a standalone Chinese website, often on its own domain
• investment in social media
• an official WeChat account
• fast communication, because an email reply after 24 hours is too slow in China

Jademond holds this first conversation free of charge. After that they check whether the client is ready to invest time and effort alongside money.

Domain, hosting and the Great Firewall

I was convinced you need a .cn domain that somehow has to be approved first. According to Marcus, neither is true.

Why a dedicated Chinese website

Baidu crawls and evaluates the entire website, including the English and German pages. Jademond observes that the more non-Chinese pages sit in the index, the less successful the site is in Baidu. Marcus calls this a Chinese quality factor. A subfolder works too, but a purely Chinese website makes things much easier.

The domain can just as well be a .com.

Hosting and ICP license

The website does not have to be hosted in China. Europe works, and Hong Kong is closer and therefore faster. If you want even more speed, you have to host in mainland China and need an ICP license for it. Only companies with a branch in China can get one.

What the Great Firewall really does

In principle, everything on the Chinese internet is reachable at first. Sites that violate Chinese law are blocked selectively. This can go as far as blocking a whole IP range, which then also hits unrelated websites.

According to Marcus, in Jademond's entire company history no client website has ever been blocked by the firewall. Something else happens more often: impressions and clicks in Baidu suddenly drop, without any notice. Then it is time to look for causes.

How Baidu SEO works

At first glance Baidu looks very similar to Google. It crawls, indexes and ranks for search terms. The difference is that Baidu is also a big publisher.

Baidu runs its own services, many of them built on user-generated content:

• Baidu Baike, a kind of Wikipedia
• Baijiahao, a social news platform
• Baidu Zhidao, a Q&A portal similar to Quora or gutefrage.net
• its own discussion forums

For interesting queries, these services often fill 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of the organic rankings. If you want to be on top for such terms, you have to run ads.

Marcus sees two other routes. The first is the long tail. With a billion people searching, there are far more unique queries, and the long tail can get very long. The second route we know from Reddit in Germany: if Zhidao ranks for a term, you can post a good answer there yourself and get found through the platform.

Baidu loses 96 million users to AI

Marcus had noted the numbers from the official reports. In 2024, 878 million people used Baidu monthly. In 2025 it was 782 million, so 96 million fewer, and that for the first time in many years. That is more people than live in Germany.

According to the reports, users are moving to AI platforms like Doubao and DeepSeek. Like Google, Baidu has AI overviews in its search results. They arrived a few weeks after the AI Overviews and first ran on DeepSeek, and now run on Baidu's own model Ernie.

With his own clients, Marcus barely sees the decline. B2B searches are very specific, for example for lab instruments. There is little content an AI can summarize, and technically strong websites even rank better there.

Baidu or WeChat: where Chinese people search

In China I had the impression that with WeChat you hardly need a search engine anymore. Marcus partly confirms that. His colleagues mainly use Baidu at work and used it for research during their studies.

In WeChat, people search for products, services, experience reports and above all for the official channels of brands. On top of that, WeChat is a transaction platform: in a restaurant you scan a QR code and get the menu as a mini app on your phone.

From this, Marcus draws a clear recommendation:

"If a B2C brand wants to enter China, I would put no focus on SEO." (Marcus)

You still need a website to prove you are a real brand. For B2C, though, the budget should go mainly into social media.

WeChat can be optimized too. Besides the official channels, whose content only followers see, there are WeChat Channels. That is a short video feed similar to TikTok. If you occupy the topics you want to be relevant for, you show up in the streams of interested people. Marcus calls this intent optimization.

One thing I noticed as a tourist: map services like Amap and Didi use their own databases. A business I had found in Amap was often not findable in Didi. For local SEO, Jademond has neither clients nor specialists, though.

GEO in China: Doubao, DeepSeek and others

In China the topic is called GEO, and since last year many requests have come in. What Marcus notices with Chinese clients: they do not necessarily expect visitors on the website from GEO. For them, it is enough to be mentioned in the AI's answers.

The most important platform is Doubao from ByteDance, essentially a Chinese ChatGPT. DeepSeek is smaller than the hype in the West suggests, but relevant too.

I found the structure of the market really interesting. Alongside pure AI companies like DeepSeek and Kimi stand tech giants with their own content universes:

• Doubao (ByteDance) can access the content of Douyin, the Chinese TikTok.
• Yuanbao (Tencent) pulls information from the WeChat universe.
• Qwen comes from Alibaba.
• Baidu has its own search index and its own content services behind Ernie and the chat agent Wenxin.

For optimization, this means: if you want to be mentioned in Yuanbao, you should fill your WeChat channel. For Doubao, the Douyin channel plays a role. According to Marcus it is not quite that simple, since an index and classic SEO exist there too. Still, the platforms have far more influence than they do here.

I believe things are heading in a similar direction for us. With every new AI provider, optimization gets more complex. At the same time, many people still think in linear attribution: one click, one purchase. That already stopped being true for SEO. How to prove GEO success to clients cleanly, neither of us had a ready answer.

A custom GEO tool and a custom CMS

For reporting, Jademond uses a platform they built themselves. Peec AI has already added two Chinese platforms, but Jademond is missing Doubao and Baidu's AI. The team started with manual queries and plugins. When the volume got too large and the platforms blocked them too quickly, two in-house developers automated the data collection, reporting and analysis. The tool is currently in beta.

Marcus himself builds a lot with Claude. He creates prototypes with vibe coding and hands them to the developers, who make them production-ready. He uses Claude through a VPN, since Anthropic does not serve China.

The best example is his own CMS. The agency website ran on WordPress, and within four years two client websites were hacked, even though plugins, templates and security plugins were up to date. Marcus then built his own CMS with Claude: PHP and MySQL in the backend, plain HTML in the frontend, with caching so that no database queries occur on page load. The site got faster, and the first clients are now moving over. I can relate to that, as I took a similar path for my own site.

My key takeaways from the conversation

These are the points I noted down:

• Dedicated Chinese website: For Baidu, a purely Chinese website is much more promising than a /cn subfolder. A .cn domain is not required.
• Hosting: Hong Kong is a good compromise. Hosting in mainland China requires an ICP license and a branch.
• Long tail and platforms: Against Baidu's own services, long-tail content and answers on platforms like Zhidao help.
• Separate B2B and B2C: B2B niches stay strong in Baidu. B2C brands do better investing in social media.
• GEO is fragmented: If you want to show up in the Chinese AI assistants, you have to serve the content universes of ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

Conclusion

I went into the conversation with the picture of a sealed-off firewall and came out with a much more nuanced one. The Chinese market is more open than I thought and follows its own rules. Anyone who wants to be found there from Germany needs more than a translated website.

If you are thinking about entering the Chinese market with your company, listen to the full episode. And if you are looking for support with SEO and GEO in the German-speaking market, get in touch with me.

FAQ: Frequently asked questions about SEO in China

Do I need a .cn domain for SEO in China? No. Marcus recommends a standalone Chinese website, which can just as well run on a .com domain. What matters more is that only Chinese pages sit in the Baidu index wherever possible.

Does my website have to be hosted in China? No. Hosting in Europe works, and Hong Kong is faster. Hosting in mainland China requires an ICP license, which in turn requires a Chinese branch.

Will my website be blocked automatically in China? No. In principle, everything is reachable. Pages with content that violates Chinese law are blocked selectively. According to Marcus, this has not happened to any client website at Jademond so far.

Is Baidu SEO still worth it when users move to AI assistants? For B2B, yes. For very specific searches, such as lab equipment, there is little content for AI summaries, and technically strong websites continue to rank well.

Which AI platforms matter for GEO in China? Mainly Doubao from ByteDance, plus DeepSeek, Kimi, Yuanbao from Tencent, Qwen from Alibaba and Baidu's own AI. Many of them draw on their parent company's content platforms, for example Douyin or WeChat.

Listen to the episode: SEO in China: Baidu, WeChat & AI Search Explained with Marcus Pentzek