Baidu adds AI citation reporting to webmaster tools, but the data is not live yet
Baidu has added an AI Traffic Analysis section to its webmaster tools, giving site owners a first-party view of how their pages are cited in AI answers inside Baidu search. Chinese webmasters spotted the menu item around September 15 and Baidu confirmed it in an official notice on September 16. The feature is rolling out in phases and the data service has not officially started, so dashboards are currently empty.
The report includes a citation trend chart, a count of cited pages over time, and tables of top keywords and top pages, sorted by clicks and capped at 50,000 entries. Data updates daily for the previous day, with Baidu warning that updates may be delayed. Baidu calculates AI CTR as clicks divided by citations rather than clicks divided by impressions, and tracks citations and impressions separately, which suggests a page can be cited without its link being seen, for example in a collapsed source list.
Baidu says the data covers only the traditional search scenario, meaning AI answers that appear within its regular results. It does not include standalone Baidu AI products such as Wenxin on chat.baidu.com, and it cannot cover rival Chinese AI search platforms including Doubao, DeepSeek, Qwen/Quark and Kimi, which run separate ecosystems and do not share data.
For brands, the keyword table is likely to be the most useful part: it shows which queries trigger AI answers that cite their content, demand data that is hard to obtain elsewhere in China. Practitioners should treat those keywords as a hypothesis to test on other AI platforms rather than a rule to copy, since each platform has different citation preferences. The launch also gives site owners a reason to keep their Baidu verification current.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗
Topics: Citations, Measurement