China’s AI search API price war has a notable absentee: Baidu. Tencent, DeepSeek and Alibaba have all spent the past month undercutting each other on the price of web search sold to agents. Meanwhile Baidu’s own pricing page, last updated on 16 October, still puts its Baidu Search API at ¥36 per 1,000 calls for the cheapest tier. On list price, that makes it the most expensive major option in the market by some way.
To be clear, this isn’t a new price announcement. It is the current list price on Baidu’s Qianfan billing documentation, and it is worth setting against what everyone else has done since September.
What Baidu charges
The Baidu Search product on Qianfan is billed pay-as-you-go per call:
- Domestic content, Standard: ¥0.036 per call (¥36 per 1,000)
- Domestic content, Enhanced: ¥0.04 per call (¥40 per 1,000)
- Domestic content, Flagship: ¥0.072 per call (¥72 per 1,000)
- Foreign content, Enhanced: ¥0.072 per call (¥72 per 1,000)
The free allowance is 1,500 calls a month, given out at roughly 50 a day. Prepaid packs valid for a year cost ¥352 for 10,000 calls, ¥3,420 for 100,000 and ¥30,600 for one million. Flagship and foreign-content calls count double against a pack. So even at the million-call level, Standard works out at about ¥30.60 per 1,000. The default limit is 3 QPS and 100,000 calls a day; anything above that means contacting Baidu.
For that money you get the URL, title, snippet, publish time and multimodal results (images, video and “notes”), with options for result count, site-restricted search and date filtering. It can be used via MCP, OpenAPI or Qianfan agents. Baidu also sells a separate “intelligent search generation” product on top, which adds multimodal and large-model AI search features.
How that compares
We set out the rest of the market when Tencent opened Yuanbao Search as an API:
- Tencent Yuanbao Search: ¥14 (Lite), ¥20 (Standard) and ¥26 (Flagship) per 1,000 calls, plus 2,000 free calls a month
- DeepSeek search/fetch API: roughly ¥5 per 1,000 successful requests (our coverage)
- Alibaba Cloud CleverSee: from ¥8 per 1,000
- Alibaba OpenSearch Pro: reportedly cut to ¥18
Baidu’s entry tier is about 2.6 times Tencent’s Lite, 4.5 times Alibaba CleverSee and roughly 7 times DeepSeek. At the top end, Baidu Flagship at ¥72 is nearly three times Tencent’s ¥26 Flagship.
Baidu is shipping elsewhere
It’s not that Baidu has gone quiet. Today it released and open-sourced ERNIE (文心) Unlimited OCR 2, which it says can parse documents of any length. In testing it handled all seven Harry Potter books, more than 3,600 pages, in one go. Baidu reports scores of 84.6 on MPDocBench and 77.1 on MarathonDocBench, ahead of Qwen, Gemini, GLM and DeepSeek Flash models. Code and weights are on GitHub and Hugging Face, and Baidu says it will show more at Baidu World on 12 November. On the search side, Baidu is also pushing developers to submit “skills” and widgets rather than pages.
My take
There are two ways to read Baidu holding its price. The generous reading is that Baidu’s index is still the deepest and freshest Chinese web index, and it is pricing that as a premium product. If an agent’s answer quality depends on finding the right Chinese government notice or local business page, ¥36 may be worth it. The less generous reading is that Baidu hasn’t decided whether it wants to be the search layer for other people’s agents at all. Every call an outside agent makes through its API is a query that never reaches Baidu’s own AI search results and ads.
For SEOs in China the practical point is simple. Price determines which index agents use by default. If developers building Chinese agents pick DeepSeek, Alibaba or Tencent (which runs on the Sogou index) on cost, then Sogou and those in-house indexes will decide more AI citations than their consumer market share suggests. Don’t optimise for Baidu alone. Check you’re indexed and well represented in Sogou and the other indexes too, and watch Baidu World on 12 November for any sign of a price cut. If Baidu does cut, this price war gets a lot more interesting.