Alibaba’s Quark Becomes Most Popular AI App In China

Posted by By Dan Taylor 3 Min Read

Alibaba’s AI assistant app, Quark, has officially taken the lead as the most popular AI app in China as of March 2025.

According to data from Aicpb.com, Quark now has nearly 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally. This puts it ahead of ByteDance’s Doubao, which has around 100 million MAUs. DeepSeek follows with about 77 million MAUs.

The rankings are based on app store data from Apple, Google, and Chinese Android platforms. Website traffic was not included.

A Strategic Shift For Alibaba

Quark began as a cloud storage and search service. It has since been rebranded into an AI assistant available on both mobile and desktop platforms.

Alibaba previously reported a total of 200 million users for Quark but did not break down how those users were distributed across different platforms.

A report from Andreessen Horowitz ranked Quark sixth globally among AI apps by MAUs in March. It followed Baidu’s AI Search, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s Edge browser with built-in AI features.

China’s AI Strategy Pays Off

Quark’s rise is being seen as a result of China’s long-term investment in artificial intelligence. In 2017, the Chinese government launched a plan to become a global AI leader by 2030, setting 2025 as a key milestone.

That strategy included large-scale funding, development of local talent, and the use of extensive data resources. The growth of Quark and other Chinese AI apps shows that this effort is bearing fruit.

Building On Existing Platforms

Alibaba’s approach with Quark shows the power of transforming existing platforms instead of creating new AI tools from scratch. By turning a previously popular app into an AI assistant, Alibaba avoided the early growth challenges that many startups face.

This strategy mirrors moves by other tech companies. Microsoft, for example, integrated AI into its Edge browser instead of launching a separate app. That helped Edge become one of the most used AI-enabled applications globally.

By repurposing Quark, Alibaba managed to outpace purpose-built competitors like Doubao. This shows how established platforms can give companies a major edge in the fast-growing AI market.

Source: Aicpb.com, South China Morning Post, Andreessen Horowitz
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