Baidu’s new AI Traffic Analysis panel finally has practitioner numbers ugly enough to be useful. A Chinese case write-up on Xingyun / 助君数智营销 (23 September 2026) walks through one well-known brand site’s Search Resource Platform screenshots: in a recent-30-day view, AI citations ≈ 1,004,742, AI impressions ≈ 120, AI clicks ≈ 39. Citations only began appearing after 1 September in that view — roughly twenty days of data. The “yesterday” slice showed ~27,998 citations, 0 impressions and 2 clicks, with Baidu’s displayed AI CTR at 0.01% because CTR is defined as clicks ÷ citations, not clicks ÷ impressions.
That CTR definition is the first thing Western SEOs get wrong. Search Engine Journal already flagged it when Baidu confirmed the menu item around mid-September: a page can be cited inside an AI answer without its link being shown (collapsed sources), so Baidu’s CTR understates visible-link performance. The Xingyun screenshots make the gap visceral. A million citations is not a million visits, not a million brand recommendations, and not proof that GEO “worked.” It is proof the page was used as evidence. Whether the brand was named, whether a phone number was read aloud by another model, or whether the user Googled / Baidu’d the brand afterwards and converted on branded search — none of that lives in the AI-click column.
Official scope still matters. Baidu’s own AI Traffic Analysis notice and the hot-keyword footnotes emphasise coverage of AI answers inside traditional Baidu Search, not standalone ERNIE chat, Doubao or DeepSeek. Data rolls out in phases; empty dashboards remain common; updates can lag. The Xingyun author also notes odd rows where impressions are 0 but clicks are positive — another reason not to treat the three metrics as a perfectly closed funnel yet.
What to do with the numbers anyway. First, verify your site in Baidu Search Resource Platform before the data firehose opens for your property. Second, build parallel KPIs: citations, impressions, clicks, and branded query lift / CRM notes that mention “saw you in Baidu AI.” Third, stop selling clients “1M AI citations” as traffic. Sell them evidence hygiene: claim, date, extractable passage — the same direction Baidu-linked research has been pushing on evidence fitness and the Milan source-concentration audit.
Opinion: Baidu shipping citation analytics is the most honest thing Chinese search has done for SEOs in years — and the 1M-to-39 ratio is the slide every GEO pitch deck should be forced to include. Zero-click is not a slogan; it is a measured product behaviour. If your China strategy still optimises only for blue-link CTR, AI Traffic Analysis will humiliate you in public. Use it.
One more caution from the same write-up: the sampled property is a household-name giant, not a mid-market industrial site. Do not clone its absolute citation volume as a KPI. Clone the discipline of separating citation, impression, click, brand mention and offline conversion — then run that discipline on your own money keywords once Baidu’s phased rollout reaches you.