Baidu's Q2 2026 earnings, released on August 18, set a clear marker: AI revenue made up more than half of total revenue for the second quarter in a row. On the call, Robin Li said Baidu has moved from an internet company to an AI-first company. For overseas brands planning to enter China through Baidu, this is not a product update. It changes how the platform works and how you should plan your spend.
📈 Baidu just became an "AI-first company" — the numbers
The earnings call gave concrete figures rather than slogans:
- AI revenue exceeded 50% of total revenue for two consecutive quarters.
- ERNIE Assistant (Wenxin) daily active users rose 83% year over year in June; average daily conversation rounds more than tripled.
- AI daily-active penetration across Baidu Wenku and Baidu Drive climbed 27.4% year over year in June.
- Apollo Go completed about 1 million fully driverless rides in the quarter; Baidu's Kunlun chip now spans three generations.
The takeaway is simple: Baidu is betting the company on AI, and search is the first surface it is rebuilding.
🤖 The Baidu SERP is now an AI engine, not a link list
Baidu described AI search improvements in three ways: answers are more reliable and better structured, hallucination rates stay low, and the model ranks content quality before answering. More important, Baidu has fused AI search with ERNIE Assistant, so the experience now continues as a multi-turn conversation instead of ending at one answer.
For users, that means the first thing they see on Baidu is often a generated answer, not a column of blue links. For advertisers, the organic and paid layers now sit underneath an AI layer that decides what gets shown and cited.
🎯 What this changes for overseas brands on Baidu
Three shifts matter for international advertisers:
- Visibility is no longer only about ranking. If Baidu answers the query directly, your ad and organic listing compete with the AI summary for attention. Brands that are only present through paid keywords can lose the top of the result to an AI-generated block.
- Being cited matters as much as being clicked. When Baidu's AI answers a commercial question, it pulls from sources it trusts. Brands with structured, authoritative Chinese-language content get named; brands with only a foreign-language site do not.
- Commercial intent still lives in paid search. AI answers handle research; high-intent "buy, price, supplier" queries still convert through Baidu PPC. The channel is not dead — it is narrower and must be paired with content the AI engine can use.
⚠️ The barrier overseas companies still hit first
The strategic story is clear, but the practical blocker for an overseas company is older and simpler: you cannot open a Baidu Ads account without a China business license. Baidu requires a mainland-registered entity, a China-facing website, and local verification. A US or EU brand with no China entity is stopped at the first step, regardless of how good its AI-search strategy is.
This is the gap most "Baidu is now AI" think pieces ignore. The platform can change overnight; the account gate does not.
🛡️ How BPP removes that barrier
BPP (Baidu PPC Pro) lets international brands run Baidu Ads without setting up a China entity:
- We open and manage the Baidu account on your behalf, using our compliant structure, so you skip the mainland license requirement.
- We build China-ready landing pages and Chinese-language content that the AI search layer can read and cite.
- We run the PPC campaign and the GEO/content layer together, so paid capture and AI visibility reinforce each other.
The result: you get the Baidu presence the new AI-first Baidu rewards, without the entity and verification wall.
Key takeaways
- Baidu's Q2 2026 makes it official: AI revenue above 50% for two straight quarters, and the SERP is now an AI engine.
- Visibility now means both ranking high and being cited by Baidu's AI answers — foreign-language-only sites lose on both.
- The hard blocker for overseas brands is not strategy but the China business license required to open a Baidu account.
- BPP lets you skip the entity requirement and run Baidu PPC and GEO content as one integrated program.
🚀 Practical next steps
If you plan to reach Chinese buyers through Baidu in the next two quarters:
- Keep Baidu PPC for high-intent commercial terms — it still converts.
- Add Chinese-language authoritative content so Baidu's AI engine cites your brand, not just your competitor's.
- Solve the account gate early; it is the longest lead-time item and has nothing to do with AI.
Baidu's Q2 numbers confirm the direction. The brands that prepare both the paid and the content layer now will own the AI-native SERP before competitors catch up.