What is Baidu? Definition, history and how it works

How does Baidu work?

Baidu works as a crawler-based search engine optimised for Simplified Chinese content hosted in mainland China. Its spider crawls and indexes pages, then ranks them with a mix of relevance, link and trust signals, much like Google. The difference is that Baidu’s results page gives a large share of space to its own properties: Baidu Baike (an encyclopedia), Baidu Zhidao (Q&A), Baidu Tieba (forums) and Baijiahao (a publishing platform). The Baidu App, which combines search with a news feed and AI answers, had 655 million monthly active users in March 2026.

History of Baidu: key dates

Baidu grew from a link analysis patent into China’s dominant search engine and an AI company. The table lists the milestones.

Baidu market share and key numbers

Baidu is the clear leader in Chinese search, especially on mobile. Statcounter’s September 2026 figures for China are shown below.

Statcounter measures page views from sites using its tracking code, so these shares describe referral traffic, not query volume. In its Q1 2026 results Baidu reported total revenue of 32.1 billion RMB, with online marketing (search ads) at 12.6 billion RMB, down 22% year on year, while AI-powered business grew 49% and passed half of core revenue for the first time.

Baidu SEO: what is different from Google

Baidu SEO rests on local hosting, native Simplified Chinese content and presence on Baidu’s own platforms. The H3s below list the main requirements I check before a China launch.

Hosting and ICP licence

Hosting in mainland China requires an ICP licence, which in practice needs a Chinese legal entity or partner. Sites hosted abroad can rank, but they must load fast inside China and drop resources blocked there, such as Google Fonts, Google Analytics and YouTube embeds.

Language, tags and rendering

Baidu expects Simplified Chinese written for Chinese readers, not machine translation. A Google-style hreflang setup alone does not make a page competitive on Baidu, so I recommend a separate Chinese site, ideally on a .cn top-level domain. Baidu’s crawler handles JavaScript poorly, which makes server-side rendering of key content important.

Baidu webmaster tools and own platforms

Baidu Search Resource Platform (Ziyuan) is Baidu’s version of Search Console, used to verify sites, submit sitemaps and monitor indexing. A Baike entry and articles on Baijiahao often appear above organic results for brand queries, so they belong in the plan alongside the website.

Baidu in international SEO and AI search

For Western brands, Baidu is a separate market with its own rules, not a translation of the Google strategy. It is the same lesson I see with Seznam in the Czech Republic and Yandex in Russia: local engines reward local signals. Baidu is also rebuilding search around its ERNIE models, so clear, quotable Chinese content matters for both classic rankings and generative answers. I build these market-by-market plans as part of international SEO projects.