Baidu’s Search Resource Platform has had AI Traffic Analysis on the menu since the 15 September 2026 announcement. The official line has not quietly changed: the feature is opening in phases, the data service was not fully switched on at launch, and complete numbers would follow. That is still the centre of Chinese webmaster chatter, not a fresh ranking-factor leak.
We already wrote up the product and the brutal maths in the launch note and the 1 million citations, 39 clicks reality check. This is the forum mood since then.
What people are actually arguing
- Empty is not “you have no AI visibility”. Practitioner write-ups such as 吖七笔记 on 21 September show the four counters — citations, impressions, clicks, and a CTR defined as clicks divided by citations — next to screenshots where hot-keyword tables are still blank because the data service had not started. The argument in those posts is to screenshot the zero, not to panic-rewrite the site overnight.
- The report is Baidu-only. 吖七 and others keep stressing that Doubao, Yuanbao, DeepSeek and the rest will not appear. Anyone selling a “China GEO dashboard” off this menu is overselling a single-engine sample.
- August and September felt like a cliff for thin corporate sites, in the same posts. Whether that was an algorithm wave or AI answers absorbing clicks, webmasters are using it as permission to delete stale near-duplicates and submit dead URLs, not as permission to sprinkle more FAQ schema on 200-word pages.
- Search Widgets get a shrug. The same authors mention 搜索小工具 and move on. Forum energy is on the citation counter, not on packaging a mortgage calculator, which tells you where the anxiety sits.
What to ignore
Ignore anyone who treats a blank AI Traffic view as proof Baidu has stopped crawling you. Classic crawl and keyword tools are still the indexation check. Also ignore CTR comparisons with Google Search Console: Baidu’s AI click-through is clicks over citations. Mix the denominators and you will brief a client with fiction.
Opinion: the useful recap is dull, which is how you know it is real. Chinese webmasters are not celebrating a new growth channel. They are relieved to have a first-party number, annoyed that it is often zero, and already being told to delete the pages that made the last two years of “content marketing” look busy. If you operate a Baidu property, log in, capture the baseline, and do not commission a GEO retainer off an empty chart. When the series finally fills, you will want the empty week on record — otherwise every vendor will claim they caused the first non-zero row.
A practical way to read the forum without living in it: once a week, open the AI Traffic view, the classic keyword view, and one Chinese write-up from a working webmaster rather than a tool vendor. Note whether the AI series moved, whether hot keywords are still blank, and whether the advice has shifted from “wait for data” to “delete these URL patterns”. If the only new posts are agencies reselling the same September screenshot, the market is quiet and your baseline log is still the deliverable. Pair that with a check that Search Widgets submissions, if you made any, have a status other than “draft in a WeChat group”. The AI flow screen is the object of discussion; the gossip around it changes slower than the sales pages imply.