Baidu’s Search Resource Platform has published two notices in the past fortnight that tell you where its attention is going. On 6 November it upgraded the brand rules for Search Widgets (搜索小工具), so developers can now put commercial brand names on the light apps Baidu shows in search. A week earlier, on 28 October, it published a much less glamorous notice: the Index Volume (索引量) tool broke on 14 October, and the data it showed until 23 October “has no reference value”.
Effort is going into agent-style widgets. The old indexing tools mostly get maintenance notices.
Widgets can now carry your brand
We covered Search Widgets when Baidu opened them in September: instead of submitting pages, sites submit interactive tools or “skills” that Baidu can call inside search. The 6 November notice is aimed at brands that want credit for them. Under the new rules:
- App logo: a brand mark can sit above or below the icon, centred, in an area no taller than 25% of the icon height.
- Cover image: a brand can appear in the top-left corner, with a suggested 32px margin from the top and left, as long as it doesn’t obscure core information.
- Header guidance text: a sign-off at the end of the line, no more than 11 characters excluding the dash, using only a recognisable brand name or company/institution short name.
Baidu says it will “gradually open more brand rights” in future. That follows the 27 October update, which added self-service cover images in 16:9 (with QR codes and contact details banned), a “distribution restricted” status with a Diagnose button that shows why a widget was rejected, and a new Skill version that checks titles and button styles automatically before submission.
Ten days of index data to throw away
The index notice is short. The platform ran overall tool maintenance in mid-October. Index Volume went wrong from 14 October and stopped updating. After a system upgrade it returned to normal on 23 October. Baidu says data shown from 14 to 23 October “does not have reference value” and asks site owners not to base decisions on it. It says data stability has been strengthened and it will keep monitoring.
The community had been warning about this. On 13 October, the day before the date Baidu now gives, the Chinese tools site 188mi told users that Baidu site: data had become chaotic, that indexed-page lookups were distorted, and that it expected a Baidu update. Third-party index checks and Baidu’s own dashboard were both unreliable for most of October.
Our take
If you report Baidu index counts to a client or manager, go back to your October numbers now. Any dip or spike between 14 and 23 October in Index Volume should be annotated as tool error, and any recommendation based on it should be withdrawn. That is Baidu’s own advice.
The bigger point is about priorities. Baidu’s recent platform output has been AI traffic dashboards, widgets, skills and a ¥4.9 Search AI API for agents. Classic webmaster tooling gets fix-it notices. Brand sign-offs on widgets are a small change, but they are the first commercial incentive Baidu has offered for building them, and the “more brand rights” line suggests more is planned. With Baidu World on 12 November, expect widgets and skills in the agent pitch. If your category suits calculators, lookups or local-service tools, this is a good moment to build one, now that your brand can appear on it.