One of the mosting interesting topic of Chinese search engines is the Baidu market share. According to Statista, Baidu has rised to 86% by the end of November, and in the meantime Sogou has rise to 4.69%, Shenma has 1.12%, Haosou has only 0.98%, followed by Bing(3.94%) and Google(2.22%).
There are no official or verified data to support the China search engine market share above. However based on our observations on the traffic trends of our clients, Baidu market share of search traffic(paid plus organic) in China is more than 90% while Haosou, Sogou, etc split the rest.
As Baidu is still the first choice of search engine in China, we recommend to focus on Baidu in Chinese SEO activities and get real results. Besides, as Chinese search engines have very similar algorithms, focusing on Baidu SEO will also benefit results on other Chinese search engines including Sogou, Shenma, etc.
