ByteDance’s Doubao phone assistant now has its own version of a robots.txt, and most of China’s biggest apps have already used it to say no. The 30-day public notice period for Doubao’s Screen Automation Execution Protocol (SAEP) closed on 14 October. Doubao says it will now gradually switch on GUI automation for third-party apps that haven’t opted out. The refusal list it published has 151 apps on it, including WeChat, QQ, Taobao, Alipay, Meituan, Pinduoduo, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Kimi, DeepSeek and Alibaba’s own Qwen.
That comes from Doubao’s official account, as reported by National Business Daily and Yicai. Yicai’s breakdown: 65 Tencent and affiliated apps, 23 from Alibaba’s ecosystem, 14 from Kuaishou, 11 from Meituan, and the rest independent apps, banks, carriers and WPS.
What SAEP actually controls
SAEP covers one thing. It decides whether Doubao’s phone assistant may operate an app through the screen. That means reading the interface, simulating taps and swipes, and completing tasks on the user’s behalf. It doesn’t stop the app being installed or used by hand. Developers declare whether they allow automation, and Yicai says permissions can be set per app, per page and per type of action. Doubao says developers can still opt out at any time after the notice period and it will “promptly” stop operating their apps. For now the assistant runs on a narrow set of hardware. Yicai mentions Nubia’s NaviX Ultra and the earlier M153 engineering phone. So the decision matters more for what it signals than for how many people it affects today.
This is the same deal the open web has offered crawlers for thirty years, now applied to agents that act in place of a user. A web publisher puts a line in robots.txt and hopes the bot obeys it. A Chinese app developer now files a declaration and hopes the agent obeys it. In both cases the protocol belongs to the party doing the crawling or clicking, and compliance is voluntary.
Why the refusals look the way they do
Yicai sorts the motives fairly. Messaging apps worry about private communications and account permissions. Ecommerce and local-services apps worry about payments, orders, refunds and who is liable when an agent buys the wrong thing. Banks have identity rules. Game publishers see GUI automation as cheating. Tencent’s terms already ban unauthorised third-party software in its games, and Doubao has admitted that some NaviX Ultra users were flagged or forced offline in Honor of Kings.
The AI names on the list are the telling part. DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen aren’t worried about cheating. They are worried about losing the user relationship. If Doubao can open DeepSeek, type a prompt and read back the answer, DeepSeek becomes an anonymous backend inside a competitor’s assistant. Alibaba is building its own agent, the Qwen Go personal agent tied to Taobao. It has no reason to let ByteDance’s agent operate Taobao or Qwen for free.
What this means for search
On paper this is a phone story, but it is really about where Chinese search is heading. More Chinese information-seeking now starts in an assistant rather than a search box. QuestMobile’s August data, cited by ifeng this week, has monthly sessions per user on search engine apps down 21.7% year on year to 35.8, while AI-native apps reached 537 million users. We have already seen DeepSeek and Qwen fighting for the top of the AI-app rankings. The next step in that fight is agents completing tasks inside other apps. SAEP shows the walled gardens will decide how far those agents get.
There are three practical consequences for anyone doing search or commerce marketing in China:
- Agent visibility is a permission problem before it is a ranking problem. A brand whose storefront is only on Taobao or inside a WeChat mini-program is invisible to Doubao’s phone agent by Alibaba’s and Tencent’s choice. That is not a tactic you can optimise around.
- The opt-out list is a map of the alliances. Whatever an app has left open, ByteDance can automate. Watch which mid-sized apps stay off the list. They are betting that agent traffic is worth more than control.
- Expect “agent-ready” to become a selling point. Independent apps and brand-owned sites that welcome agent operation could end up with an advantage in assistant-led journeys, much as open-web sites still get cited by AI answers that can’t reach the walled gardens.
The parallel with Korea is hard to miss. Naver has shut outside AI crawlers out of Blog, Cafe and Knowledge iN and told Meta’s agent it can’t shop on Naver. The big Asian platforms are coming to the same conclusion at the same time: their own AI gets their data and their screens, and nobody else’s does.
Opinion: ByteDance deserves some credit. A public protocol with a notice period, a published refusal list and a standing right to opt out is far more open than agents that simply scrape screens and ask forgiveness later. But a list of 151 refusals, led by every company big enough to matter, is a verdict on the deal. The open question is regulation. Beijing has already shown it is willing to step into AI marketing, most recently by fining GEO vendors over fake AI rankings. A protocol that ByteDance writes, administers and enforces against its rivals is exactly the kind of thing regulators may want to own.