Baidu to Offer Ernie Bot AI Chatbot for Free Starting April 1

Posted by By Dan Taylor 1 Min Read

Baidu announced that its AI chatbot, Ernie Bot, will be available for free starting April 1. The company cited improved technology and reduced costs as the main reasons for the change.

Free Access for All Users

Ernie Bot will be accessible at no cost on both desktop and mobile platforms. Baidu shared the update in a WeChat post, signaling a shift in its AI strategy. Previously, the company charged a subscription fee for certain AI-powered search features.

Competition in China’s AI Market

Baidu has faced strong competition in China’s AI sector. DeepSeek, a rising AI company, offers free chatbot services with performance that it claims rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4. Other competitors, such as ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot, have also gained traction.

Despite being an early leader in AI development, Baidu has struggled to achieve widespread adoption for Ernie Bot. The latest version, Ernie 4.0, is said to match GPT-4’s capabilities, but user engagement remains lower than that of its domestic rivals.

Along with making Ernie Bot free, Baidu will introduce an advanced search function, also available at no cost starting April 1. This feature promises improved reasoning capabilities and tool integration, allowing users to receive expert-level responses.

Source: Baidu continues to refine its AI offerings to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor