DeepSeek and Tencent Launch Their Own AI Search Engines

Sanbi_Ai · reddit · 2026-10-24

Two Chinese AI companies made the same move within days. On Oct 17, DeepSeek switched search on its website and API to an in-house engine — claiming an index of hundreds of billions of pages, filtering SEO spam and GEO manipulation, priced at $0.75 per 1,000 requests via API. Its privacy policy previously only mentioned unnamed third-party search APIs. On Oct 20, Tencent opened Yuanbao Search through Tencent Cloud, the engine behind its Yuanbao assistant and 50+ Tencent products, claiming hundreds of millions of daily calls and 157 authoritative sources across 13 industries.

How they pick sources is the key part:

DeepSeek's API returns an authority tier (0–4) per result. A day-one test showed every page on the same host gets the same tier — a big site's reputation carries over to everything on it. That cuts both ways: spam PDFs on a US government site got the top tier.
Tencent says it rates quality at site, account and page level, favors authoritative sources, and tries to answer with as few documents as possible.

The search layer under these assistants is becoming the real gatekeeper: if your site isn't indexed or sits on a low-authority host, the AI may never see it. Caveats: the DeepSeek test was one person, one day, one region; Tencent's numbers are self-reported.

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DeepSeek and Tencent Launch Their Own AI Search Engines

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