A new "AI Traffic Analysis" section in Baidu's webmaster tools reports AI citations, impressions, clicks, and a CTR — spotted by Chinese webmasters around September 15, 2026 and confirmed by Baidu the next day, though the dashboards are still empty as it rolls out in phases.
2026-09-23 · by Moe Ameen
Baidu, China's largest search engine, has added a new section to its webmaster tools called AI Traffic Analysis that reports how often a site's pages are cited inside AI-generated answers. Chinese webmasters began noticing the new menu item around September 15, 2026, and Baidu confirmed it in an official notice on September 16, 2026. It is one of the first times a major search engine has broken AI citations out as their own reporting category rather than folding them into general search performance.
The section reports four metrics: AI Citations (how often a site's pages are cited in an AI answer), AI Impressions (how often users see the link to a cited page), AI Clicks (clicks through to the page from those answers), and an AI CTR. The CTR is where Baidu departs from the search-console logic most marketers know: it calculates AI CTR as clicks divided by citations, not clicks divided by impressions. In other words, the denominator is how many times you were cited, not how many times a cited link was shown.
The data is not live yet. Baidu says the feature is rolling out in phases and the data service has not officially started, so the dashboards are currently empty. Coverage is also scoped: it covers AI answers inside Baidu's "traditional search scenario" — the AI-generated results that appear within regular Baidu search — not standalone AI products or other Chinese AI platforms.
There is a caveat worth flagging against the hype. Some Chinese-language coverage suggested AI citations would boost a site's "weight," Baidu's rough equivalent to PageRank, in rankings. Baidu has said nothing of the kind. For now this is a measurement feature — a way to see whether AI answers are quoting you — not a confirmed ranking factor.
Two honest boundaries first. Baidu is not a [Kompozy](/) publishing destination — Kompozy fans out to the eight social platforms plus blog and email, not to Baidu, WeChat, or the Chinese search ecosystem. And a citation-reporting dashboard is a measurement tool, not something you generate. So the play here is not "publish to Baidu with Kompozy." It is upstream of that: AI engines — Baidu's included — cite structured, substantive, question-answering pages, and that is the content Kompozy produces at volume. What Baidu just did is put a number on a game the rest of the search world is already scoring, which makes the supply side (are you publishing the kind of pages that get cited, fast enough and often enough to appear?) the thing you can actually control.
Concretely: point Kompozy at your source material and it generates the durable, citation-shaped assets — Blog Articles that answer a real query end to end, Email Newsletters, Carousel Posts and Text Posts that restate the same claims in the formats different engines pull from — governed by a Persona Brief so the voice stays consistent and a banned-word filter so it does not read as generic AI filler (a known citation killer). [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) keeps that stream shipping on a cadence through a per-post review pipeline, so you are adding cited-worthy pages every week instead of publishing once and waiting. For a China-facing brand, host the blog output where Baidu crawls it; for everyone else, the eight social platforms plus blog and email are the surfaces Kompozy publishes to directly. To turn "get cited" into a repeatable practice rather than a lucky hit, start with our guide to [generative engine optimization and AI-answer citations](/guides/generative-engine-optimization-and-ai-answer-citations) and the step-by-step on [how to win citations in AI answers](/how-to/win-citations-in-ai-answers).
Baidu added a section called AI Traffic Analysis that reports how a site performs inside AI-generated answers. It shows four metrics — AI Citations (how often your pages are cited in an AI answer), AI Impressions (how often the cited link is seen), AI Clicks, and an AI CTR. Chinese webmasters spotted it around September 15, 2026, and Baidu confirmed it in an official notice on September 16, 2026, though the data service has not officially started, so the dashboards are still empty.
Baidu calculates AI CTR as clicks divided by citations — not the usual clicks divided by impressions that most search-console reporting uses. The denominator is how many times your page was cited in an AI answer, so the metric measures how well a citation converts into an actual visit.
Baidu has not said so. Some Chinese-language coverage suggested AI citations might boost a site's "weight" (Baidu's rough equivalent to PageRank), but Baidu has made no such claim. For now, AI Traffic Analysis is a measurement feature that shows whether AI answers are quoting you — not a confirmed ranking factor.
No. Kompozy publishes to the eight social platforms plus blog and email, not to Baidu or the Chinese search ecosystem. What it does is generate the structured, question-answering blog articles, newsletters, carousels, and posts that AI engines — Baidu's among them — tend to cite. For a China-facing brand, you would host that blog output where Baidu crawls it; the citation-tracking dashboard itself is Baidu's, not something Kompozy produces.