Sogou’s homepage has been redesigned down to almost nothing: a new logo and a search box. Inside that box is an “AI mode” button. Chinese product site Woshipm describes the redesign as “a logo and an input box”, with answers and references shown side by side in AI mode. It says the traditional web entry point has been demoted and the weight shifted onto Tencent’s Yuanbao search. Its verdict: this is not “adding a Q&A button”; Sogou wants to “completely overturn its previous search model”.
Add the shutdown of Sogou Wenwen, its Q&A platform, on 7 November, and Tencent is clearly rebuilding Sogou from a keyword engine into an AI answer engine.
What the new Sogou looks like
Combining Woshipm’s walkthrough with a detailed explainer from AIGCMap, which credits hands-on testing by the blog 简单黑板报:
- Minimal homepage. No navigation bar, just the search box. It uses the fifth-generation Sogou logo introduced before Chinese New Year 2026. The box offers voice input, image/file upload and the AI mode toggle.
- Two explicit modes. Press Enter and you get a hyperlink list with infinite scroll instead of pagination. Click “AI mode” and you get a conversation mode with a summarised answer, multi-turn follow-ups and references in a side column.
- Yuanbao under the hood. AI mode is powered by Tencent Yuanbao, built on Tencent’s Hunyuan model. AIGCMap stresses that it is not the same product entry as the Yuanbao app.
- Authoritative sources broken out. The second-generation AI mode lists academic and popular-science, institutional and mainstream-media sources separately, rather than mixing every page into one ranking. AIGCMap says this “significantly raises the indexing status of authoritative content”.
- Sogou Scholar is back. A second-generation academic search is built in. In testing it currently only indexes English-language academic content, with AI translation into Chinese. Sogou first launched academic search on 2 June 2016 and later shut it.
- Ads. In testing, conversation mode showed no commercial ads; hyperlink mode still had them, but they can be collapsed with one click. (We covered that ad-hiding feature on 23 October in our report on Bing China, Baidu and Sogou.)
Access to the second-generation AI mode is limited for now. The internal test began in September and is open only to QQ Browser users on PC and mobile, who have to apply through an online form. It doesn’t generate images, audio, video, PDFs or slides. It is a search-understanding tool, not an all-purpose assistant.
Sogou Wenwen closes on 7 November
At the other end of the product, ITHome and Tencent News reported on 12 October that Sogou Wenwen (搜狗问问) and its points mall will stop service at 23:59 on 7 November 2026 (Beijing time), citing “business adjustment”. Accounts will be cancelled automatically. Users are told to screenshot or copy anything they want to keep, because all content will then be deleted or anonymised under China’s Personal Information Protection Law.
Wenwen began life as Tencent’s SOSO Wenwen and, per ITHome, had more than 100 million users across dozens of categories. It was Sogou’s answer to Baidu Zhidao. In SEO terms it was a large store of user-generated long-tail answers that both Sogou and other engines ranked. All of it is about to go.
Why the distribution matters
The QQ Browser detail is the key one. Sogou is the browser’s default search engine, and Tencent says QQ Browser has more than 400 million monthly active users across devices. Earlier this month Tencent also opened Yuanbao Search to developers as an API built on Sogou’s index (our 21 October report). So Tencent now has the index sold to developers as an API, the same index powering a consumer AI mode, and a browser with 400 million users to push it through. That is a full AI-search stack, and it hasn’t needed a marketing campaign so far.
Dan’s take
The “authoritative sources listed separately” detail is the one I’d watch, and it is also the least verified. If Sogou’s AI mode really does split academic, institutional and mainstream-media sources into a separate group, citation in Chinese AI answers will reward who you are more than how well you’ve optimised a page. That is a stronger version of what we already see in Baidu’s AI answers and on Yandex. My evidence caveat: everything here comes from third-party hands-on testing of a gated beta, not from Sogou documentation. The source lists, ad behaviour and Scholar coverage could all change before a wider launch.
What to do now: if you have legacy Wenwen answers driving traffic or brand mentions, archive them before 7 November and expect those URLs to disappear. Check your Sogou and QQ Browser referral traffic separately from Baidu’s. And if you publish for Chinese audiences, invest in the signals that put you in the “authoritative” bucket: institutional backing, media coverage and properly attributed research. More in Sogou.