Two routes exist for a company with no mainland entity, and neither is a workaround in the sneaky sense. Baidu’s resellers run one. Baidu runs the other.
Baidu held 63.97% of China’s search engine market across all devices in November 2025, and 77.86% on mobile.
Source: StatCounter, cited by The Egg, February 11, 2026
Nothing else in China buys that reach, which is why teams clear the paperwork instead of walking away. StatCounter’s China panel moves around, so read it as a scale.
What either route costs you is control more than money, and the choice follows you into hosting and crawl performance long after launch, which is where a web agency based in China earns its fee.
What Baidu asks a mainland advertiser for
Both foreign routes are defined by which of these requirements they replace.
A mainland business license (营业执照, yíngyè zhízhào) is the anchor. With it, an identity document for the legal representative carrying six months or more of remaining validity, and a corporate bank account in the license holder’s name. Three documents that do not point at one entity will not clear review.
Then the domain. Its registrant has to be the entity holding the ad account, and this catches more foreign brands than the license does. Global domains usually sit with a headquarters legal team somewhere else, and nobody checks until creative comes back rejected.
Landing pages have to be in Simplified Chinese, and what they say has to sit inside the business scope written on the license. Business scope in China is narrow and literal. License says trading, page sells consulting, that is a rejection.
ICP filing (备案, bèi’àn) enters when the landing page is hosted in mainland China. It is a condition of the hosting, not of the account, and that distinction becomes the main structural problem on this page.
Regulated verticals face a further qualification review, with sector licenses to produce.
The first route rents somebody else’s license
The usual answer is an agency sub-account. A local partner agency holds the master account under its own mainland license and your campaigns run underneath it. License, bank account, legal representative ID, all the agency’s. What you supply is creative, budget and a landing page.
Approval is reported at five to ten working days. Setup is quoted around USD 300 to 500, with ongoing management at 10 to 15 percent of spend. Those numbers come out of agency marketing material, not Baidu, so treat them as indicative and get a written quote before a budget depends on them.
The fee is not the thing to worry about. The account is not yours. The agency is the entity of record, so the account and its history leave when the relationship does. Changing agencies means a rebuild, not a transfer, and we have watched clients learn that at renewal.
The second route puts your own name on the account
Baidu also sells to advertisers outside the mainland directly, through an international account track open to entities registered in qualifying jurisdictions. Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and France are on the list, and the list is longer than that.
The paperwork has a different character to it. A passport scan of the signatory instead of a mainland ID. Translated business registration and bank statements instead of a unified social credit code. A Chinese-language landing page with contact details visible on it, which reads like an existence check as much as a language requirement.
Approval is reported at three to five working days, quicker than the agency route, though from the same marketing sources. The account sits in your own company’s name. That is the whole reason to go this way.
Jurisdiction is the catch. A German or Italian parent does not qualify on its own, and the usual fix is a Hong Kong or Singapore entity. That carries tax and legal consequences well outside a marketing conversation, so involve a lawyer early.
| What differs | Agency sub-account | Baidu International |
|---|---|---|
| Entity of record | The agency | Your company |
| Reported approval | 5 to 10 working days | 3 to 5 working days |
| If you walk away | Account stays behind | Account goes with you |
Two numbers set the entry price
Opening directly, the deposit is RMB 5,000. Through a local partner it is RMB 6,000, the difference being an RMB 1,000 agency fee folded into the figure.
Minimum daily budget is RMB 100, which is a design constraint more than a cost. Ten campaigns is a thousand renminbi a day committed whether the traffic earns it or not, so the granular structures that work on Google get expensive here fast.
Dropping the entity usually means dropping mainland hosting
This is the structural cost, and it never shows up on a quote.
Mainland hosting requires an ICP filing, and the filing requires a mainland entity. If you took the international or agency route precisely because there is no mainland entity, the filing is not available to you, and neither is hosting inside the Great Firewall.
So the landing pages end up offshore, usually Hong Kong or Singapore, and every mainland request crosses the border. Latency rises, and the failures it produces are the intermittent kind that nobody can reproduce on demand. None of it stays on the paid side. A site that is slow or unreachable from inside China is a site Baiduspider has trouble with. Unfiled sites are also reported to index more slowly than filed ones, and Baidu’s fast crawl privileges require a filing outright.
Paid and organic share one website. A decision taken to get campaigns live turns up later as an organic problem nobody connects back to it.
The Merchant Center question nobody has answered
If product feeds are in the plan, raise this before signing anything.
Merchant Center access is a permission switched on for an ads account you already hold. Key accounts get it by default and everyone else applies by email through a regional manager. Whether it can be granted on a Baidu International account or an agency sub-account is not documented anywhere, and Baidu has not said either way.
What is knowable is where the request goes. It runs through mainland regional account management, on a product whose documentation stopped being updated in January 2021. That is not proof of anything, but it does not point in a promising direction. Ask during agency selection, and ask for the reply in writing.
Fees and approval windows on both routes come from resellers rather than Baidu, so verify current numbers before budgeting.
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