Baidu Cuts Search API Promotional Price to 4.9 RMB, Undercutting DeepSeek
Baidu has announced a promotional price of 4.9 RMB per thousand requests for its search AI API, undercutting DeepSeek's standard pricing of 5 RMB per thousand requests. This announcement was made alongside major product upgrades focusing on search boxes, AI lenses, GUI visualization, and AI interactive applications. This aggressive pricing strategy highlights the intensifying price war within the Chinese AI and search API market as major tech players compete for developer adoption. Lowering API costs makes advanced AI-powered search and agentic tools more accessible to businesses and developers. Baidu's upgraded AI assistant now shifts from single Q&A interactions to delivering complete deliverables for complex tasks, covering over 170 scenarios. Additionally, the AI lens now supports multi-target dynamic tracking and real-time conversation in nine dialects.
## BACKGROUND
Search APIs allow third-party developers to programmatically access web search results and data to power their own applications and AI agents. DeepSeek recently introduced its own web search and fetch API priced at 5 RMB per thousand requests, which has quickly become a benchmark for comparison in the industry.