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Baidu runs China's biggest search engine and sells the ads that appear next to search results, and it also builds AI tools and self-driving technology.
Baidu is best known as China's dominant search engine — the place hundreds of millions of people type questions into every day, much like Google in the West. People use it to find websites, news, maps, videos, and answers. That habit gives Baidu something extremely valuable: attention, and a record of what each person is curious about in the moment.
The main way Baidu turns that attention into money is advertising. Companies pay Baidu to show sponsored links and ads when someone searches for something related to what they sell — a hotel pays to appear when you search for travel, a clinic when you search for symptoms. This is auction-style marketing: the more valuable the search term, the more advertisers pay. Search ads remain Baidu's cash engine, though the company now also sells ads across its other apps, like its short-video and news feeds. Baidu has two other big bets. Its "Core" business includes its AI cloud, where it rents out computing power and sells AI software to companies and governments. And it is one of the world's most serious developers of self-driving technology, through its Apollo program and its robotaxi service, which has been giving paying rides in several Chinese cities without a driver behind the wheel. It also runs ERNIE, its own family of AI language models, competing with rivals like Alibaba and Tencent.
The honest picture is mixed. Baidu's search dominance once made it look untouchable, but newer apps — especially short-video platforms like Douyin — stole people's time and advertisers' budgets, and Baidu's growth has slowed. It has also faced its share of criticism over ad quality and content. Still, its huge pool of AI engineers, its early lead in robotaxis, and the giant home market give it real advantages as it tries to convert search money into an AI and autonomous-driving future.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026