Does Baidu index websites in English?

If your site is only in English, the useful question isn’t whether Baidu can store it. It’s whether anyone you care about will find it there.

So we looked at live results, then at what Baidu and others have published. This guide belongs to our overview of Baidu SEO: how it differs from Google.

It covers language only. Servers and location are in does Baidu index foreign websites?

Does Baidu index English pages?

Yes, in practice. English pages appeared on Baidu for English searches. Whether they came from Baidu’s own index or a partner feed can’t be seen from a results page.

We loaded three Baidu results pages on November 1, 2026.

Search	Language	Visible results	English pages
project management software 1	English	8, then 9 on reload	6 both times
industrial valve manufacturer germany 2	English	7	6
项目管理软件 3	Chinese	Mostly ads, few clearly organic	0

The English pages included OpenProject, Microsoft Project and Birdview for software, and ARI and LVD Valves for valves.¹² The other results had Chinese snippets, including a Baidu Baike entry on the valve search.

What has Baidu said about English sites?

Nothing direct that we could find. That silence matters, because many guides write as if a rule exists.

• Ranking: Baidu’s 2020 principles sort results by how well they meet the user’s overall need.⁴
• Exclusions: The same text bars cheating content, low-quality content and content that’s costly to access. It doesn’t mention language.⁴
• Foreign servers: Baidu’s 2017 notice warns of display problems for Chinese-language sites on foreign servers.⁵ It says nothing about English sites.
• Server advice: A second 2017 note advises against foreign servers, again for Chinese-language sites.⁶

So no Baidu text we read bans English, and none promises to serve it. Everything beyond that is inference or agency opinion.

Where published advice disagrees

Most guides agree on direction, but they differ on how far it goes. One says English isn’t indexed at all, which our English searches contradict. None gives measured data on English pages.

Source	Claim	Evidence shown
Liquid Light, updated 2023	Baidu only indexes Simplified Chinese, so English won’t be accepted 20	None
Marketing to China, 2026	An English page won’t rank for Chinese searches 7	None
SEO Sherpa, 2026	Chinese pages consistently outperform English ones 10	None for that line
Nanjing Marketing Group, 2022	Baidu indexes some English content, only on sites useful to Chinese users 8	None
WebNots, 2015 and 2020 replies	You can submit an English site, but it probably won’t help 11	None
China Briefing, 2015	Baidu doesn’t index many non-Chinese pages 19	One search example
Pentzek, Search Engine Journal, 2023	Baidu indexes global content but clearly prefers Simplified Chinese 9	Agency correlation study

The strongest number needs care. Pentzek reports that about 85% of content is in Chinese characters, without saying how that was measured.⁹ The study comes from Jademond Digital, a Chinese digital marketing agency.¹⁸ It covered the top 20 results for 10,000 Chinese keywords, so it says nothing about English searches.⁹¹⁸

SEO Sherpa gives a similar figure, 83% of top pages in Simplified Chinese, and links it to that same Jademond study.¹⁰ The study page we opened shows no language figure.¹⁸ Don’t count 83% as separate evidence.

Can an English page rank for Chinese searches?

Nothing we found shows that it can, except at the edges. Our one Chinese search showed no English pages, and Marketing to China rules it out, though without data.³⁷

There’s a simple logic here, and it’s our inference, not Baidu’s statement. Baidu ranks by how well a page meets a need,⁴ and a page the searcher can’t read meets it poorly.

Mixed pages are the edge case.

His account also shows that Chinese pages are no guarantee. They were listed only after long effort, then dropped repeatedly, and he reports them delisted since 2022.¹²

He also found that scrapers and machine translation had copied fragments of his English home page, with errors, in a 2017 test.¹² So your words may reach Baidu in a form you don’t control.

Does anyone search Baidu in English?

Some people did in 2011, but the size today is unknown. The last figure we found is 15 years old.

In July 2011, Baidu executive Zhang Dongchen told Marketing Week the engine got around 10 million English searches a day, largely from international students and overseas business people.¹⁴

That same month, Credit Suisse analyst Wallace Cheung told TechNode that few people used Baidu for English content.¹³ Neither statement is current.

The 2011 deal was meant to show Bing’s English results on Baidu’s page, with a label.¹³¹⁴ We saw no Bing label in the text of our two English searches, but that doesn’t show the deal has ended.¹²

Free check

Is your website visible on Baidu?

Enter your website. We check Baidu, access from China and how your site is set up, then email you the report.

Your websiteCheck my site

Is it worth submitting an English-only site?

Probably not on its own. WebNots said in 2015 that English sites can be submitted. In June 2020 it said submitting a fully English site probably won’t help at all.¹¹ That’s one blog’s comment replies, and we found nothing newer.

Baidu itself says submission shortens discovery but doesn’t guarantee indexing.¹⁵ It won’t fix a language mismatch either.

Submission also takes setup. See Baidu Webmaster Tools in English for the Chinese interface, and the phone number problem.

That effort pays better once you have Chinese pages to submit.

How to test your own site

You can run this check in a few minutes, and it beats any general answer. First confirm that your site loads from China, then search on baidu.com:

1. Your brand in English. Add a product word if your name is common.
2. What you sell, in English. Use the words a buyer would type.
3. What you sell, in Simplified Chinese. Ask a Chinese speaker to phrase it naturally.
4. site:yourdomain.com. Baidu calls this an estimate, not a count.¹⁷
5. Steps 1 to 3 on a phone. Brown found desktop and mobile results differed.¹²

Note the date and what you saw. Our own site: attempt was stopped by a captcha, so you may need to search by hand.

What to do about it

Decide by who you want to reach, not by what Baidu can store.

Your goal	English pages	Chinese pages
Reach people searching in Chinese	Keep them, but don’t count on them for this	Needed, in Simplified Chinese
Reach English speakers in China	Useful, if the site loads there	Optional, and worth testing
Only test demand	Keep them	Start with a few key pages

You don’t need to translate everything at once. Nanjing Marketing Group calls an all-Chinese site ideal but not always feasible.⁸ Start with the pages to translate first.

Choose Simplified or Traditional Chinese by audience. One checklist suggests English URLs on English pages and pinyin on Chinese ones.¹⁶

Be careful with raw machine output. Baidu bars low-quality content,⁴ and Marketing to China says poor translations rank badly, without data.⁷ See our machine translation guide.

The bottom line

Baidu shows English pages, at least for English searches, but we found no sign they reach people searching in Chinese.

If those people are your market, your key pages need to exist in Simplified Chinese. Even then, Baidu promises nothing, so test and measure as you go.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, handle its submission to Chinese search engines where the account allows it and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic. We don’t guarantee traffic or rankings, because no one controls how Chinese search engines rank a page.

You can see what we do or book a 30-minute call.

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