How do you track your Baidu rankings?

Every rank tracker gives you a clean number for Baidu. Few tell you what that number means, and two sources may not agree.

This guide shows what each source measures and how to build a setup you can trust. It’s part of our guide to Baidu SEO.

What should you use to track Baidu rankings?

Use Baidu’s own tool if you can get an account, and add a third-party tracker for the keywords you care about. Neither replaces the other, because they answer different questions.

Source	What it gives you	Needs	Main weakness
Baidu 流量与关键词	Average position, impressions, clicks 1	Verified Baidu account	Past averages only 2
Third-party tracker	A dated snapshot of positions	Your keyword list	An outside estimate
Baidu Tongji	Visits and, per its help page, search terms 6	Tag on your pages	Measures visits, not rank
Your own search	One result page, one time	Nothing	Not representative

Baidu 流量与关键词

• Where did I appear on average, and did these words bring clicks?

Third-party tool

• Where am I on the check date for my chosen keywords, and my competitors too?

VS

Tracking starts after indexing. A page Baidu hasn’t indexed can’t rank, so check which pages Baidu has indexed first.

What does Baidu’s own tool show?

It shows how your site performed in Baidu search, using Baidu’s own data. It’s the only rank figure here that comes from Baidu.

The tool, 流量与关键词 (Traffic and Keywords), sits in Baidu’s Search Resource Platform. Baidu’s documentation describes this:

• Metrics: impressions, clicks, click-through rate and rank.¹
• Periods: today with about 5 hours’ delay, yesterday, 7 days, 30 days, or a custom range within 30 days.¹
• Volume: up to 50,000 keywords and 50,000 pages, sorted by clicks.¹
• Devices: PC and mobile data are reported separately.³
• Your own list: a custom feature lets you follow chosen keywords, with no limit stated.¹

That average is useful for trends and weak for spot checks.

The tool also misses some things:

• Keywords without clicks. Baidu describes hot keywords as those that earn many clicks, so a term ranking deep may not appear.³ Add it as a custom keyword.
• Non-organic traffic. The data covers natural results only, and excludes Aladdin partnership traffic.²
• History. Detail stops beyond the last 30 days.³ Save your own copy, or you lose the trend.

These pages date from 2020 to 2022 and were read logged out, so check them against your account. A 2016 notice also announced a 30-day, per-keyword view of rank trends on PC and mobile, at first only on the platform’s mobile version.⁴ Check whether your account shows it.

You need a verified account, which is the hard part for a foreign company.

See Baidu accounts and the phone number problem and how to set up Baidu Webmaster Tools.

Which third-party tools track Baidu?

Several do, and their limits differ more than their marketing suggests. This is what each vendor states on the pages we read in November 2026.

Tool	Devices	Location	Depth	Note
Semrush	Desktop only 10	National only 10	Top 50 in 2018 11	No Baidu volume, CPC or SERP features in 2018 11
AccuRanker	Desktop, mobile 12	No local tracking 12	Not stated	Each device counts as one keyword 12
Dragon Metrics	Desktop, mobile 1314	Not stated	Not stated	Also 360, Sogou, Bing; 30+ SERP features 13
Rank Tracker	Not stated	Not stated	About top 30 per check 15	Downloadable software 15
Ranktracker	Not stated	Not stated	Not stated	Free checker, no method given 16
DataForSEO	Desktop, mobile, tablet 18	City advertised 17; GPS not advised 18	Up to 700 18	API for developers, $0.60 to $2 per 1,000 SERPs of 10 results 17

Check these on the vendor’s site before you buy. Prices and features change, and we haven’t tested these tools side by side.

Read the location column closely. DataForSEO markets GPS targeting,¹⁷ but its own documentation says coordinates resolve to the closest city and advises against them, as results may not match those coordinates.¹⁸

The last row matters for another reason. DataForSEO notes that Baidu’s result links are encoded, which makes matching a result to your URL hard.¹⁷ Ask any vendor how it handles this.

Automated collection is also fragile. A community-built tool listed on Apify says Baidu gates results behind a session cookie and reacts to the requesting IP. If the desktop results are blocked, that tool falls back to mobile.¹⁹

If a tool can switch device on its own, your history may mix two series without telling you.

These tools are also outside collectors, not Baidu data. Baidu’s robots.txt disallows every path for agents it doesn’t name,²⁴ and Baidu says it can’t interpret data from other platforms.²

We found no official Baidu rank API. Baidu does offer a web search API, but its documentation describes no rank or position field.²⁸

Why don’t two sources show the same rank?

Because they often don’t measure the same thing. Five differences can open a gap, and the size of the last one is unknown.

Cause	What differs	What we know
Timing	Period average or snapshot	Baidu’s rank is an average 1
Device	PC or mobile	Reported separately by Baidu 3
Location	Country, city or GPS	Vendors differ 101217
Counting	What takes up a position	At least one tool skips ads and Baidu placements 19
Personalization	Who is searching	No Baidu measurement found

Counting deserves a closer look. Apify’s listing returns organic rank without paid ads or Baidu’s internal placements.¹⁹ So a first place in that data can sit below other results on screen.

Ryte’s 2022 study, using Dragon Metrics, found Baidu’s own products in the top 3, 10 and 30 in all 5 sectors tested, on a small keyword sample.²⁰ See Baike, Tieba and Baidu’s own results.

Location and personalization are where the evidence runs out. We found no published measurement of either on Baidu, and no Baidu statement. A 2020 agency post says Baidu “seems to display local content” by location, but it gives no data.³⁰

The nearest evidence is a 2017 study of Google and Bing, where 11.7% and 15.8% of results differed through personalization, varying widely by query and rank.²³

That doesn’t transfer to Baidu. It’s only a reason not to treat one screen as the truth.

The same applies to your own search. A search from your office shows what Baidu served you at that moment. Use it to see the page layout and who competes with you, not to report a rank.

Should you track mobile or desktop?

Track both as separate series, and read mobile first on Baidu. StatCounter’s October 2026 figures show why: Baidu holds 60.37% of mobile search in China, against 29.65% on desktop.²¹²²

Those are shares within each device, not how Baidu’s own searches split, and they move from month to month. Across all sites, StatCounter gave mobile 55.87% of China’s web traffic that month, against 42.78% for desktop.²⁹

Bing leads on desktop in the same data, at 46.01%.²² So a desktop-only Baidu report covers the screen where Baidu is weaker. That’s the limit Semrush currently states.¹⁰

If your buyers are office-based B2B users, desktop may matter more for you, so check your own visit data.

See Baidu mobile SEO and Bing in China.

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.

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Can analytics show your Baidu keywords?

Less than you’d expect. Baidu stopped showing keywords in the referrer on June 25, 2015, and pointed site owners to its Webmaster Platform tool or Baidu Tongji.⁵

So a general analytics tool can’t simply read them. An Adobe employee tested this in 2018, found no keyword in the referring URL from Baidu, and said they didn’t believe Baidu passes it.⁸

Baidu’s advice leaves Tongji as the analytics option. Its help page, updated in 2022, describes a search terms report with two useful features:⁶

• The original results page for a term, and which page of results it was on.
• An “Other” line for terms not displayed, with a booked download of all terms for the following 30 days.

Hosting is the other open question. A 2015 China Briefing article calls the tool available to “any China website,”⁹ which doesn’t settle the case of a site hosted abroad. Install it and see.

How to set up Baidu rank tracking

Six steps give you a series you can read. The order matters, because the first choices are hard to change later.

1. Write the list in Simplified Chinese. Use your buyers’ terms from your Baidu keyword research. Add your brand name. AccuRanker says Baidu favors Chinese content.¹²
2. Group by purpose. Separate brand, product and informational terms. Averages hide movement when they’re mixed.
3. Name a target page for each keyword. It shows when Baidu ranks the wrong page, or several of yours compete.
4. Connect Baidu’s tool if you can. Add your priority terms as custom keywords.¹
5. Choose one tracker and freeze it. Set device and location once, and write them down. Run mobile and desktop as separate groups. In AccuRanker, that doubles your keyword count.¹²
6. Keep your own log. Save date, keyword, device, source, rank and URL. Baidu’s detail stops at 30 days.³

Note outside events in the log as well. Baidu said its index volume data for October 14 to 23, 2026 had no reference value after a failure.²⁷

A dated note stops you from explaining a data problem as an SEO result.

What to do when a rank changes

Look at the trend first, then the site. Baidu warns against comparing only short-term differences.² Its checks below are written for a traffic drop, and we apply them to a fall in position.

What you see	Check first
Change in one tool only	That tool’s settings and device
Many keywords fall at once	Site access, crawl errors, robots.txt 2
Losses share a URL pattern	Recent redesign, redirects, dead pages 2
Odd pages or spam terms appear	Hacked or injected pages 2
One page slips slowly	Content, and who moved above it
Rank holds but clicks fall	Page layout on the results screen

Baidu lists two more tools for this: crawl diagnosis and crawl errors.² If the site has vanished from results altogether, go to why your site isn’t showing on Baidu.

An empty chart for a new page isn’t a verdict either. See how long Baidu takes.

For keywords in English, see whether Baidu indexes English websites.

The bottom line

If you remember one thing, make it this: a Baidu rank means nothing without its source, device and date.

Pair Baidu’s own data with one tracker, keep the settings fixed, and save your history. Then judge the trend alongside impressions, clicks and enquiries.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, work on getting it indexed on Chinese search engines and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic.

We don’t promise rankings or traffic. See what we do, or book a 30-minute call.

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