Tencent has opened Yuanbao Search to outside developers. It’s the search engine behind its Yuanbao AI assistant, and it’s now sold through Tencent Cloud as an API, an MCP server and an agent “Skill”. Prices start at ¥14 per 1,000 calls. That makes four of China’s biggest AI players selling web search to machines rather than people, and the last week has turned it into a price war.
The announcement came on 20 October. Phoenix Tech’s write-up on Tencent News and IT Home have the details. Tencent says the index runs into the hundreds of billions of documents. It handles “hundreds of millions” of calls a day and already powers more than 50 internal products, including WorkBuddy, ima, Tencent Video and Tencent’s fintech arm.
What’s actually in the index
Tencent’s product overview says the index covers the public web plus Tencent’s own content: Tencent News, Sogou Baike and Penguin (企鹅号) creator accounts. On top of that sit 157 “authoritative” sources across 13 verticals, including finance, medicine, law and travel. Named partners include Shenwan Hongyuan, Ctrip, Variflight, Tencent Yidian and Tencent Maps. Tencent claims 99%+ coverage of A-share, Hong Kong, US, Japanese and Korean company filings, and minute-level freshness for policy, news, weather and market data.
The parts that matter most for SEO come before ranking starts. A large language model parses each page before it goes into the index, keeping titles and tables. It then scores quality at site, account and page level, prefers authoritative sources, and filters out low-quality content. Results are ranked on relevance, timeliness and authority. Where an answer needs several documents, the system picks ones that complement each other and covers the topic with as few documents as possible. If your page says the same thing as a stronger source, you’re the duplicate that gets dropped.
The engineering numbers are aimed at agent builders. Inverted, vector and “fusion” indexes run in one system with 94% recall and 8ms average retrieval. Documents are pre-compressed to roughly 100 tokens and cached, which cut the core ranking model from 149ms to 30ms. Tencent says end-to-end response time in the Yuanbao app dropped by nearly a second.
Sogou, reborn as plumbing
Tencent didn’t spell this out in the launch, but coverage relayed by Dongcha Beating says Yuanbao Search’s underlying technology is derived from Sogou Search. That’s plausible: Tencent bought Sogou outright in 2021 and Sogou Baike is listed as a content source. It also isn’t Tencent’s first external search product. A Tencent Cloud “Web Search API” has existed since July 2025. What’s new is the Yuanbao branding, the vertical sources and the push to agents.
Our take: Sogou’s share of consumer search has been fading for years, and this is what’s left of it. A crawler, an index and a ranking stack don’t need a homepage to make money any more. They need agents to call them 3–5 times per question, which is the fan-out Tencent itself cites. If you’ve written Sogou off as a traffic source, it may still be choosing what Tencent’s AI cites. See our Sogou coverage for the background.
The price list, and the race to the bottom
There are three tiers: Lite at ¥14, Standard at ¥20 and Flagship at ¥26 per 1,000 calls. Flagship is for enterprises only. Everyone gets 2,000 free calls a month. Lite covers the public web only. The authoritative vertical sources, images, dynamic snippets and up to 50 results need Standard. “Authority grade” scores per result are Flagship-only.
Compare that with the rest of the market. DeepSeek opened its in-house search and fetch APIs on 17 October at roughly ¥5 per 1,000 successful requests (we covered that launch here). Alibaba Cloud folded its IQS service into a new CleverSee brand on 18 September, priced from ¥8 per 1,000. Alibaba’s separate OpenSearch Pro tier was reportedly cut to ¥18 on 15 October. ByteDance’s Volcano Engine relaunched its service as Doubao Search in the summer.
Tencent is the most expensive of the four, and it’s betting that curated vertical sources are worth the premium. That’s a reasonable bet for finance and health, where a wrong answer is costly.
What to do with this
Three things for anyone optimising for Chinese AI answers.
First, the “157 authoritative sources” list is a whitelist. In regulated verticals, the paid tiers will favour partners, and getting into that pool matters more than ranking.
Second, all four vendors now expose some form of authority or relevance score per result. That’s the same pattern we flagged with DeepSeek, and with China’s regulators already fining GEO vendors, expect those scores to be tuned against manipulation, not for it.
Third, a page squeezed into 100 tokens needs its main claim up front. Answer first, preamble never.
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