How do you get listed on the 360 search engine?

The guides we could open tell you to submit your site to 360 Search, then move on to its history. None gives the steps or quotes 360 itself.

We read 360’s own help pages and its page quality white paper for this guide. Some are years old, so we flag where they stop being useful. For the wider picture, see our guide to Chinese search engines.

How much does 360 Search matter?

It’s a real but secondary engine. StatCounter gave it 8.67% of measured search clicks in China in October 2026, listed under the name Haosou.¹ Its weight depends heavily on the device.

Scope, October 2026	Haosou (360)	Rank
All devices 1	8.67%	4th
Desktop 2	16.70%	3rd
Mobile 3	3.96%	5th

1. All devices8.67%
2. Desktop16.70%
3. Mobile3.96%

Yandex and Google sit above it on some of these lines. We found no explanation for those two figures.

Its so.com host took 6.05% of measured clicks in all, against 2.63% for m.so.com.⁴

Qihoo made its engine the default in its own browser in August 2012, which may explain part of that desktop lean, though we can’t prove it.²⁴

StatCounter counts clicks to sites using its code, not searches.³¹ Our market share guide explains how to read these numbers.

How do you get listed on 360 Search?

You need a 360 account, an open robots.txt, a submission and a verified site. Baidu’s tools don’t carry over,²¹ and IndexNow doesn’t list 360 among its engines.²⁵

1. 1Check with site:
2. 2Open robots.txt
3. 3360 account
4. 4Submit site
5. 5Verify ownership
6. 6Add sitemap
7. 7Check again

1. Check first. Search site:yourdomain.com on so.com. If your pages appear, 360 has already indexed them.⁵
2. Open your robots.txt. Don’t block 360Spider. Images use 360Spider-Image and video uses 360Spider-Video.⁶
3. Get a 360 account. The webmaster platform requires one,¹⁰ and the submission page redirects to a 360 login.¹¹
4. Submit your site. Use the inclusion page at info.so.com/site_submit.html.¹¹ 360 says this speeds things up, and that it emails the result to your contact address once your site is indexed.⁵
5. Add and verify your site. On the webmaster platform at zhanzhang.so.com,¹⁷ choose code, file or CNAME verification. 360 gives six hours for code and file, wants a new CNAME record after 24 hours, and suggests file or CNAME for HTTPS sites. The owner can then add other admins by 360 account email.⁹
6. Add a sitemap. Once verified, choose to add new data, then wait. Processing time varies with file size.⁷
7. Check again. Repeat the site: search, and watch for referrals from so.com and m.so.com in your analytics.

Keep your sitemap within 360’s limits:⁷

Item	360’s rule
Formats	XML, plain text, or a sitemap index
Encoding	UTF-8 or GBK, and UTF-8 for XML
Each sitemap	Up to 10MB and 50,000 URLs
Each URL	Up to 256 characters
Each index file	Up to 500MB
Updates	Manual, and they fail if the file hasn’t been crawled yet

We couldn’t open the submission form or the platform without logging in, so we can’t describe those screens. 360’s help pages are in Chinese, so have someone ready to read them.

What does 360 refuse to list?

360 doesn’t promise to index every page, and it says it prioritizes quality sites that serve users well.⁵ Its sitemap page adds that it guarantees neither crawling, indexing nor rankings.⁷

Its inclusion standards name what it doesn’t welcome:⁵

• Content that doesn’t comply with relevant laws, regulations and policies
• Improper data collection, deception, phishing or malware
• Excessive redirects, ads or pop-ups
• Mirrors or copies of other sites
• Pages built for search engines, not users
• A catch-all for other unwelcome sites

Its 2017 white paper, the most detailed text we found, goes further and says what happens next:³³

Problem	What 360 says it does
Site often unstable, especially the homepage	Cuts indexed pages and rankings
Parked or unreachable domain	Deletes the site from its index
Mass scraping of other sites	Cuts indexed pages and rankings, or refuses the site
Unsafe site	Lowers rankings, or refuses it
Ads or layout that block reading	Lowers rankings, or refuses the page
Many dead pages	Hurts indexing and rankings across the site

Its notices on named algorithms point the same way, though they’re old:

• Houyi, from December 2016, cuts exposure for scraped, stitched-together and ad-heavy pages, and gives original work more visibility.¹⁵
• ICO removes low-quality and invalid URLs from the index, with duplicate content as a named target in a May 2014 notice.¹⁶
• Wukong, dated December 2016 with a 2.0 in April 2017, targets hacked sites.¹⁴³⁴

That suggests copied translations are a poor bet. Our guide on how to translate your website covers the alternative.

360 tells site owners to consult the white paper before applying.³⁰⁵

The same agreement says it’s governed by Chinese law, with disputes going to the Beijing Arbitration Commission.¹² Read it before you submit, and ask a local adviser if your business or content is sensitive.

Do you need an ICP for 360 Search?

Not according to the inclusion rules we read. The inclusion standards, the inclusion agreement and the white paper mention neither an ICP nor sites outside China.⁵¹²³³

That’s silence, not permission, because we haven’t tested a foreign site.

The one firm ICP rule we found covers a different thing: 360’s official-site mark.

Item	ICP in 360’s text?	What it says
Inclusion standards 5	No	Quality, safety, user experience
Inclusion agreement 12	No	Reachable, stable, lawful
Sitemap submission 7	No	No guarantee
Page quality white paper 33	No	Content, safety, stable access
Official-site mark, commercial sites 8	Yes	MIIT ICP filing needed, personal filings excluded

The mark also excludes some industries and allows one site per company entity.⁸ A site without an ICP doesn’t meet that condition as written.

For what an ICP covers and who can get one, read do you need an ICP license.

Free check

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Which claims about 360 should you ignore?

Be wary of market shares without dates, and of any tip that predates the platform’s changes. Here’s how the claims we met hold up.

Claim	Where it appears	What we found
360 has 25 to 30% of the market	Sampi, December 2025, citing no source 22	16.52% in December 2025, 18.17% at its 12-month peak 1
360 has about 35%	A 360 director, 2018 23	A vendor’s own figure, in a promotional interview
360 offers a ping tool	360’s platform, until 2017 13	Notice set it to go offline in mid-August 2017 13
360 lets you manage external links	360’s platform, until 2017 13	Same notice, same timing 13
Set a Crawl-delay for 360Spider	Sample robots.txt, 2026 29	Not among the directives 360 documents 6
Baidu SEO carries over	Dragon Metrics, 2013 24	Plausible, but anecdotal even in that guide

The 2017 notice also claims 360 can now grade link quality by itself, so manipulative links don’t affect display or ranking.¹³ That’s 360’s own statement, and we have no independent test of it.

Which 360 tools can you skip?

Most companies can skip the extras at first. They serve specific sites, or need approval.

Tool	Who it’s for
Smart summaries	Short video, film and TV, novels and news 18
News source inclusion	News sites, at about 5 to 10 items a day 19
Original content sitemap	Sites approved by email review, for first-published content 20
Indexpage robots directive	Pages that update often 6

Two platform features are worth keeping, though both rest on old notices. A December 2016 notice offers registered site owners free SMS and email alerts if their site is hacked.¹⁴

And 360 said in May 2017 that it would gradually drop keywords from referral data, pointing webmasters to the platform instead.¹⁷

Does 360 need its own SEO plan?

Rarely, at the start. Use the same Chinese site, and treat 360 as a separate submission and a separate data source.

Marketing to China says the same on the site itself, and warns that your Baidu sitemap isn’t mirrored to 360.²¹

We found no ranking factor list from 360. Its white paper names broad dimensions, such as content quality, user experience and access, with no weights,³³ so any precise factor list you see is someone’s inference.

If your buyers are mostly on mobile, Baidu is the better use of your time.³ If they search from desktop, 360 has more weight, though Bing and Baidu still lead it.²

Sogou and Shenma are smaller again in StatCounter’s data.¹

If you track positions there, check first that your tool covers so.com. Our rank tracking guide covers the Baidu side.

The bottom line

360 Search takes its own account, verification and sitemap, and it promises nothing in return. If you remember one thing, make it this: rely on 360’s own rules, and check how old they are.

It’s a modest job with a modest audience, heavier on desktop than on mobile. Do it after Baidu, then let your referral data decide what comes next.

How Index in China can help

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