Baidu’s AI Comeback, Bing’s 20-Point Crash: China Search Engine Market Share in 2025
Source data: StatCounter Global Stats (desktop & mobile), full-year 2025 — updated through early 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Baidu surged ~20 percentage points across all platforms in 2025, driven by its January AI Overview launch — recovering from years of Bing-led erosion.
- Bing collapsed on mobile, dropping from ~19% in late 2024 to just 6–8% by end-2025 — a structural reversal, not a blip.
- Desktop and mobile tell completely different stories: Bing still holds ~29–34% on desktop, while Baidu owns ~64–78% on mobile.
- Haosou (360 Search) is quietly consolidating at 18–25% on desktop, making it a relevant third player brands should not ignore.
The Headline Nobody Expected Heading Into 2025
At the start of 2024, Baidu looked like it was losing the Chinese search market in slow motion. Bing had climbed to nearly 38% of desktop share and was chipping away at mobile too, fuelled by Windows 11 defaults and the halo effect of Microsoft’s global AI push. Baidu’s overall share had fallen from over 70% just a few years prior.
Then Baidu launched AI Overview in January 2025, and everything reversed.
By the end of 2025, Baidu had clawed back nearly 20 percentage points across all platforms — the largest single-year swing in China’s search market in recent memory. Bing, meanwhile, suffered a mirror-image collapse on mobile. Understanding why this happened matters as much as the numbers themselves, especially if you’re planning search investment in China right now.
Desktop Search: A Three-Way Market with Shifting Dominance
China’s desktop search market in 2025 was unusually competitive by Chinese internet standards. Here’s how the numbers moved across the year:
Desktop Search Engine Market Share — China, 2025 trend (Statcounter)
| Engine | Early 2025 | Mid-2025 (Jul) | Late 2025 (Nov) | Jan 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baidu | ~36% | 32.81% | ~39% | 38.33% |
| Bing | ~41% | 32.60% | ~33–34% | 28.69% |
| Haosou (360) | ~14% | ~18% | ~18% | 24.66% |
| Yandex | ~3% | ~3% | ~4% | 3.62% |
| ~3% | ~3% | ~3% | 2.79% | |
| Sogou | ~2% | ~2% | ~2% | 1.86% |
A few things stand out sharply:
Bing is losing ground on desktop too. It entered 2025 at roughly 41% and has slid to under 29% by January 2026 — a drop of more than 12 percentage points. That’s a significant structural retreat, not noise.
Haosou is the quiet winner on desktop. Starting the year around 14%, it has climbed steadily to nearly 25% by January 2026 — an 11-point gain. Most western marketers never talk about Haosou. That’s a mistake. It now commands a desktop share comparable to what Google holds globally in many mid-size markets.
Baidu has stabilised on desktop at around 38–39%, which is actually a recovery from a trough. Given that desktop Baidu was below 33% as recently as mid-2025, the recovery reflects real user behaviour change, not just bot traffic adjustments.
What this means for you: If your China SEM strategy only includes Baidu and treats desktop as an afterthought, you’re leaving coverage gaps. Haosou’s 360 Ad Platform and Bing’s China offering (Bing.com operates in China and accepts RMB ad spend) are both underutilised by foreign brands. Desktop users in China skew toward enterprise professionals, researchers, and higher-income urban consumers — precisely the demographic many B2B and premium consumer brands are trying to reach.
Mobile Search: Baidu’s Domain, Yandex’s Surprise Surge
Mobile is where China’s search market is actually decided. With over 95% of Chinese internet users accessing the web primarily via smartphone, mobile figures are the ones that drive overall share numbers.
Mobile Search Engine Market Share — China, 2025 trend (Statcounter)
| Engine | Late 2024 | Mid-2025 (Jul) | Late 2025 (Nov) | Mar 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baidu | ~45–55% | 71.91% | ~78% | 63.77% |
| Yandex | ~4% | ~8% | ~8% | 13.64% |
| Haosou (360) | ~7% | ~4% | ~4% | 11.62% |
| Bing | ~19% (Nov 2024) | 10.10% | ~6% | 7.51% |
| Sogou | ~2% | ~2% | ~2% | 1.67% |
| ~1% | ~1% | ~1% | 1.39% |
The contrast with desktop could not be starker.
Baidu’s mobile dominance is extreme. It peaked near 78% in late 2025 before settling back toward 64% in early 2026 — still a near-monopoly. The Baidu app’s deep integration into Android OEM defaults, plus its ERNIE AI features (voice search, visual search, multi-modal queries), keeps users inside the Baidu ecosystem. The app now has over 1.1 billion total users across its service suite.
Bing’s mobile collapse is the story of 2025. It fell from 18.84% in November 2024 to around 6% by end-2025 — a loss of roughly 13 percentage points in 12 months. This wasn’t a gradual drift. The timing correlates directly with Baidu’s AI Overview rollout: once Baidu’s mobile search product became meaningfully smarter, the marginal Bing mobile user reverted to the default local option. Bing’s mobile presence was always largely driven by Windows/Edge integration on desktop; on mobile, it had no such structural advantage.
Yandex’s emergence is puzzling but real. Rising from ~4% to nearly 14% on mobile is a significant jump for a Russian search engine with no obvious Chinese marketing presence. This likely reflects VPN usage patterns, proxy configurations among certain user segments, or shifts in how Statcounter’s tracking captures referrals from certain Android app browsers. Marketers shouldn’t treat Yandex as a meaningful ad target in China — but it’s worth monitoring as a signal of shifting browser defaults among specific demographics.
What this means for you: Mobile-first China strategy means Baidu-first strategy, full stop. Brands that are not running Baidu paid search, not optimising for Baidu’s mobile search results, and not building Baidu-indexed content are essentially invisible to the majority of Chinese consumers using search.
What Drove the Shift: Four Forces at Work
1. Baidu’s AI Overview — A Genuine Product Catalyst
Baidu launched AI Overview (AI搜索) in January 2025, powered by ERNIE 4.0. This wasn’t cosmetic. It introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of results, enhanced Knowledge Cards, multi-modal search (image + text queries), and conversational follow-up within search. Chinese users adopted it quickly. Baidu’s share recovery tracks almost perfectly with this launch timeline.
2. Windows 11 + Edge — The Bing Tailwind That Ran Out of Road
Bing’s surge from 2021–2024 was substantially a distribution story, not a quality story. Windows 11 defaults in Edge, combined with Microsoft’s Copilot integration, funnelled traffic to Bing from enterprise and professional desktop users. That tailwind has now been largely exhausted — the addressable pool of users who would switch to Bing via device defaults has already switched. Without organic user preference to sustain growth, Bing’s share is reverting.
3. Mobile OEM Defaults and App Ecosystem Lock-In
Baidu’s dominance on mobile is structurally reinforced by pre-installation on most domestic Android devices (Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo). When a Chinese consumer buys a new phone, Baidu is almost certainly the default search option. Bing has no equivalent distribution deal at scale in China’s Android ecosystem.
4. Social Search Eating Into the Overall Pie
One factor that doesn’t show up in these numbers but shapes their context: Chinese users are shifting discovery behavior toward social platforms. Xiaohongshu (RED) now processes approximately 600 million searches per day. Douyin (TikTok’s China version) and WeChat also function as de facto search engines for product discovery and local services. The traditional search engines are competing not just with each other, but with an entire parallel discovery ecosystem. Brands that only think “SEO/SEM” and ignore social search are optimising for a shrinking slice of total consumer attention.
Practical Implications for Brands Targeting China
If you’re running or planning a China digital marketing program, here’s what the 2025 data tells you to do differently:
Double down on Baidu mobile SEO and SEM. With 64–78% mobile share, Baidu is not optional. Ensure your Baidu site verification (百度站长工具) is active, your mobile pages are indexed, and your paid account is structured around mobile bid adjustments. Baidu’s AI Overview also means featured-snippet-style optimisation is now relevant — structured content and clear factual answers are increasingly surfaced in AI-generated results.
Don’t abandon Bing China for desktop B2B. Bing’s desktop share (~29–34%) is concentrated among higher-value users — enterprise professionals, researchers, and bilingual knowledge workers. For B2B brands, tech companies, or premium consumer categories, Bing desktop reach remains commercially meaningful. Bing Ads China operates in RMB and offers less competition (and often lower CPCs) than Baidu for certain categories.
Build a Haosou strategy if you’re serious about desktop. 360 Search’s climb to 24%+ on desktop cannot be ignored indefinitely. Its ad platform (360 营销) is accessible to foreign brands and reaches a distinct user segment. Consider it an efficiency play — lower competition, growing reach.
Integrate social search into your content strategy. Xiaohongshu SEO, Douyin content optimisation, and WeChat Search indexing are now core components of a complete China search presence — not add-ons. Users who find your brand via Baidu will cross-reference on RED before converting. Your content ecosystem needs to be coherent across both.
Track share by platform, not just overall. The desktop/mobile divergence in China is extreme. A brand that only looks at blended market share numbers will systematically misallocate budget — over-indexing on Bing (strong on desktop, weak on mobile) or under-indexing on Baidu (dominant on mobile, recovering on desktop).
The Bigger Picture
China’s search landscape in 2025 is more dynamic than it has been in a decade. Baidu’s AI-driven recovery is real and likely durable — provided ERNIE continues to improve and user adoption of AI search features deepens. Bing’s position, though diminished, is not irrelevant, particularly for desktop and enterprise. And the growing presence of Haosou, combined with the parallel rise of social search, means that any single-engine strategy will leave meaningful reach on the table.
The most sophisticated China search strategies we see are multi-platform, mobile-weighted, and increasingly integrated with content ecosystems that extend beyond traditional search into social discovery. The brands that update their approach based on where users actually are — not where they were two years ago — will have a measurable advantage.
Navigating China’s search landscape requires local expertise and real-time data fluency. If you’re building or refining your China digital marketing strategy, we’d love to help you make sense of what these shifts mean for your specific category and audience. Get in touch with our team.
Data sources: StatCounter Global Stats (desktop and mobile, China, 2025–2026); supplementary analysis from The Egg, Flow Asia, Market Me China, and Jademond Digital. Market share figures reflect page-view-based tracking across StatCounter’s network of 2M+ sites.
