To track and improve where your brand appears in AI answers in China, the first thing that decides the playbook is which engines are even reachable: China blocks every Western answer engine on the mainland, so a brand is seen there through Baidu Ernie, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen and ByteDance Doubao instead, engines Cituna does not track. Cituna measures the Western seven that decide how you appear to the English-speaking, diaspora and international-buyer traffic that reaches you from outside the Great Firewall. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode are restricted or unavailable in China. The home-grown engines in this market are Baidu Ernie, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen (Tongyi), ByteDance Doubao and Moonshot Kimi, which Cituna does not track. Cituna measures your standing across none of the seven engines Cituna tracks, they are restricted here, in Chinese (Mandarin)-relevant queries, and joins it to Google Search Console so a change can be checked against real clicks rather than taken on trust.
Which AI engines matter in China
In China, the seven engines Cituna tracks are restricted, so a brand is seen domestically only through the local engines below. Cituna still matters for the international, English-language and diaspora traffic that reaches you from outside the country, which those seven engines shape.
The market’s own engines, Baidu Ernie, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen (Tongyi), ByteDance Doubao and Moonshot Kimi, carry a large share of domestic answers and are not interchangeable with the Western set. Cituna does not track them, and we say so plainly rather than implying coverage we do not have: a brand serious about China needs a local-engine plan alongside the Western one.
The language buyers actually query in
Buyers in China query in Chinese (Mandarin), and an AI engine answers in the language of the question. A brand whose only content is in another language is simply absent from that answer, however strong its site is, because the passage the engine would lift does not exist in the language it is answering in.
Baidu is the dominant traditional search engine here, and its index still seeds much of what the answer engines retrieve, so the two are not separate projects: earning the classic result and earning the AI answer in China are the same content, in the right language, made citable.
What is specific to China
The market-specific fact worth planning around: China blocks every Western answer engine on the mainland, so a brand is seen there through Baidu Ernie, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen and ByteDance Doubao instead, engines Cituna does not track. Cituna measures the Western seven that decide how you appear to the English-speaking, diaspora and international-buyer traffic that reaches you from outside the Great Firewall.
Run the check yourself before accepting anyone’s advice about China, including ours: ask the engines that are reachable here a question your buyer would actually type, in Chinese (Mandarin), and record which brands are named and which are absent. The answer for your category and your city inside China will differ from the general case in ways that change what is worth fixing.
How to track and improve AI visibility in China
Because the Western engines are restricted in China, tracking here means two separate programmes: Cituna for the international and English-language answer those seven engines still shape, and a local-engine plan for Baidu Ernie, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen (Tongyi), ByteDance Doubao and Moonshot Kimi that a domestic tool must cover. Treating them as one is the mistake that wastes a quarter.
Cituna tracks all seven engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, from the $39 Starter, and joins the result to Google Search Console so a movement in China can be checked against real clicks. The most useful output is usually not the score but the competitor list, because it tells you which brands are being named in your place in this market.
Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.