Baidu's H1 2026: AI Marketing Revenue Grew 15% — But the Growth Is Slowing

Baidu published its 2026 interim report on September 17–18. The headline coverage focused on the uncomfortable numbers: total revenue down, profit down sharply. Buried in the segment detail is the figure that actually matters to anyone buying Baidu advertising — and it tells a more nuanced story than either the headlines or the earlier quarterly reporting suggested.

📋 The interim report in one table

The AI revenue figure is the one Baidu leads with, and it is structurally sound: RMB 26.1bn represents 51% of general business revenue, meaning the AI business is now larger than everything else Baidu does combined.

🎯 The line advertisers should read

The most relevant component sits at the bottom of the AI breakdown:

AI-native marketing — the Baidu product line that advertisers actually buy — reached RMB 4.9bn for the half year, up 15% year on year.

This is a meaningful revision of the picture we reported in our September 2 analysis of Baidu's Hong Kong listing, where we noted that Q2 AI-native marketing was RMB 2.6bn, roughly flat year on year. That Q2 figure still stands. What the cumulative view adds is the context that makes it readable:

• H1 total: RMB 4.9bn, +15% year on year
• Q2 alone: RMB 2.6bn — flat year on year, but up about 11% quarter on quarter
• Implied Q1: roughly RMB 2.3bn, which means Q1 carried strong year-on-year growth

So the accurate reading is deceleration, not stagnation. AI marketing revenue grew double digits across the half, but the year-on-year comparison flattened in Q2 while sequential growth continued. Reporting only the quarterly year-on-year figure — as we did on September 2 — understated the trajectory; reporting only the half-year figure overstates the momentum.

🖥️ But compute still carries the growth

The structural point from the Q2 report is unchanged, and the interim report makes it clearer: 62% of Baidu's AI revenue comes from selling compute, not from selling AI products or advertising.

AI cloud infrastructure at RMB 16.1bn — up 65%, with GPU cloud up 230% — is nearly as large as AI applications and AI-native marketing combined (RMB 9.9bn). Baidu's AI transformation is, financially, still a data-centre business with an advertising business attached.

That matters for advertisers in a specific way. A company whose AI revenue depends on renting GPUs has less commercial pressure to make its ad products succeed than one whose AI revenue depends on them. Baidu's AI marketing line is growing, but it is not yet the load-bearing part of the story — which means product investment will keep flowing, and pricing will stay competitive.

📉 Why profit fell 61.7%

The profit decline deserves proportionate treatment, because most of it is not operational.

• Non-operating factors dominate. Other gains, net, fell to RMB 810m from RMB 9.4bn a year earlier — driven by long-term investment fair-value gains turning into losses, plus wider foreign-exchange losses. The profit fall is largely a mark-to-market effect, not a collapse in the underlying business.
• Operating profit still fell 20%, to RMB 6.2bn, as revenue declined and cloud-related costs rose (cost of sales up 8% YoY).
• Management's own framing is candid. CEO Robin Li said the online marketing business "remains under pressure" while pointing to momentum in core AI new business. CFO He Haijian noted that core AI new business revenue continues to account for half of general business revenue.

The honest synthesis: the AI side is growing, the traditional advertising side is still shrinking, and the two have not yet crossed the point where AI fully offsets the decline.

🌏 What this means for overseas advertisers

Three judgments follow.

1. The AI marketing product line is growing but decelerating — which is normal for a two-year-old category. Entering now means entering during the build-out phase, before the category matures and pricing hardens.
2. Investment is still flowing into products, not just infrastructure. The RMB 4.9bn marketing line sits alongside a RMB 16.1bn compute line that is growing 65%. Baidu can afford to keep improving its marketing stack — 擎舵 (creative agents), AIMax (automated placement) and the AI placement assistant, all upgraded in early September — without needing them to carry the P&L yet.
3. Do not read the AI headline as "Baidu advertising has transformed." The advertising-adjacent AI revenue is roughly one fifth of Baidu's AI revenue. The traditional search advertising business is still the one under pressure, and it is still where most advertiser money sits today.

Also worth noting for capital-markets context: after converting to a dual-primary listing on September 1 and joining Stock Connect on September 7, Baidu was added to the HKEX Tech 100 and US Tech 100 indices on September 11, with three more Hang Seng tech-theme indices due after October 23.

🧭 Where BPP fits

The practical implication for a brand outside China is straightforward. Baidu's AI marketing products are in a growth phase with heavy investment behind them — and the commercial terms, creative tooling and placement automation are all improving. But those products live inside 百度营销, behind account opening, Chinese-language operating requirements and settlement.

BPP works at that boundary: Chinese-entity access without a Chinese license, campaign setup inside Baidu's AI marketing stack, and reporting that reconciles what the platform claims with what the account actually delivers.

The half-year number is a positive signal. It is not yet a transformation.

Figures in this article are drawn from Baidu's 2026 interim report as reported by 100EC, etnet and ChinaTechNews. Where sources differ on a metric, we use the interim-report figure. Currency conversions use the rate implied by the source reporting (RMB 63.4bn ≈ US$9.3bn).