TL;DR — We asked DeepSeek (one of the AI engines hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers now ask instead of searching) the same buyer questions you'd ask any assistant — "what are the best running shoes?", "which EV should I buy?" — for five global brands. The result: visibility on China's AI is wildly uneven. Nike, Apple and Tesla show up in 100% of relevant answers; Starbucks appeared in only 50%, and McDonald's was the top pick just 1 out of 3 times (KFC keeps beating it). In every category, Chinese challengers quietly surface. If you only track ChatGPT/Gemini, you can't see any of this.
Why we ran this
"GEO" — generative engine optimization, i.e. making sure AI assistants mention your brand — is the new SEO. But almost every GEO tool tracks only the Western engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude). Meanwhile, in China, 900M+ people now ask AI assistants like DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and GLM for product recommendations. That's a blind spot for any brand selling into — or competing in — the China market.
So we ran a quick pilot with our own tool, the AI Brand Visibility Monitor, across five categories, asking DeepSeek the kind of questions real buyers ask.
What we found
| Category | Western brand | Appeared in | Ranked #1 | Sentiment | Chinese rivals surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sportswear | Nike | 4/4 (100%) | 4/4 | +1.0 | Li-Ning, Anta |
| Smartphones | Apple | 4/4 (100%) | 3/4 | +0.75 | Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo |
| Electric vehicles | Tesla | 4/4 (100%) | 3/4 | +1.0 | BYD, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto |
| Fast food | McDonald's | 3/4 (75%) | 1/3 | +1.0 | KFC |
| Coffee | Starbucks | 2/4 (50%) | 1/2 | +1.0 | Luckin Coffee, Manner |
(Sentiment is a −1…+1 score on the mention; "Appeared in" = share of the four category prompts where the brand was named at all; "Ranked #1" = how often it was the first brand named.)
Three takeaways:
- Being mentioned is not the same as being recommended. McDonald's appeared in most answers but was the top pick only once in three — KFC, the runaway fast-food leader in China, kept taking the #1 spot. Tesla and Apple each lost #1 once too, to Chinese rivals (BYD/NIO; Huawei/Xiaomi).
- The real risk isn't bad sentiment — it's invisibility. Sentiment was positive everywhere (+0.75 to +1.0). The problem for Starbucks isn't that DeepSeek dislikes it; it's that DeepSeek often doesn't bring it up at all (50%), while Luckin Coffee and Manner — its Chinese challengers — do surface.
- Chinese challengers show up in every single category. A brand monitoring only Western engines would never see that, in China's AI, Li-Ning, BYD, Huawei, KFC and Luckin are part of the consideration set.
How we measured it (methodology)
- Engine: DeepSeek (this pilot; the tool also covers Qwen, Kimi, GLM and the Western engines).
- Brands & prompts: 5 categories, one focal Western brand each, 4 real buyer-intent prompts per category (category, comparison, recommendation, and direct-brand questions), with the main Chinese competitors supplied for share-of-voice.
- What each "check" returns: for one brand × one prompt × one engine — whether the brand was mentioned, the sentiment of that mention, its rank versus the named competitors, share-of-voice, and the sources the engine cited.
- We report outcomes only — what the engines answer, not how the data is gathered.
Limitations (so nobody over-reads it)
This is a snapshot pilot: 5 brands × 4 prompts × 1 engine = 20 checks, single run. AI answers are volatile — studies suggest a large share of brand citations shift month to month — so a single run is a photo, not a movie. The point isn't statistical proof; it's a live demonstration that AI visibility in China diverges from what Western tools show, and that it's measurable. A fuller study (more brands, more engines, weekly tracking) is the obvious next step — which is exactly what the tool is built to do on a schedule.
See your own brand
Want to know whether DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and GLM mention your brand — and who they recommend instead? The AI Brand Visibility Monitor runs this for any brand and prompt set, across Chinese and Western engines, on a schedule. Run it once with no API key for a free sample.
It's the only tool that covers the Chinese AI engines — the engines Profound gates to Enterprise and most mid-market GEO tools don't track at all.
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