Statcounter and China’s Search Engine Market Shares: Where the Data Falls Short

Understanding search engine market shares in China is crucial for businesses aiming to succeed in the world’s largest online market. The Chinese digital landscape, dominated by Baidu and other local players, operates very differently from the West. Companies need accurate data to make informed decisions about SEO and digital strategies, but that’s where things get tricky.

Statcounter, a popular tool used by marketers worldwide, is often the first stop for search engine market data. It pulls data from over a million websites globally, making it an easy choice for tracking trends, even in China. But there’s a catch: its data doesn’t always reflect the reality of the Chinese market. For example, in April 2023, Statcounter showed Bing overtaking Baidu in desktop search and Yandex nearly surpassing Baidu on mobile. These claims, which were later corrected, raised serious doubts about its accuracy (screenshots here).

In this article, we’ll explore why Statcounter may not be the right tool for measuring search engine market shares in China and offer stronger alternatives.

Minimal Adoption of Statcounter in China: Key Insights from Our Baidu SEO Study

In our recent Baidu SEO study, where we analyzed the top 20 rankings for 10,000 Chinese keywords, one of the most striking findings was the minimal presence of Statcounter. We found it integrated into just 0.01% of top-ranking Baidu pages—almost nonexistent.

For comparison, Google Tag Manager, which is how most websites implement Google Analytics, appeared on 2.4% of these pages. While Google Analytics faces its own challenges in China, it’s still far more widely adopted than Statcounter, which barely makes an appearance.

The implication here is significant. If Statcounter is used on such a tiny fraction of high-ranking websites, it’s hard to imagine that the tool could provide an accurate or representative view of China’s search engine landscape. The data is drawn from a sample that’s simply too small to be meaningful in a market as vast and unique as China’s.

Impact of Low Adoption on Data Reliability

The sheer scale of the Chinese internet is staggering. With 3.88 million websites operating in China as of December 2023, it’s clear that any tool aiming to track search engine market shares needs a wide and representative sample to provide reliable data. Unfortunately, Statcounter doesn’t come close to achieving this.

Based on our findings from the Baidu SEO study, where Statcounter appeared on just 0.01% of top-ranking pages, we can extrapolate that the tool is likely used on around 388 websites across the entire Chinese internet. Even if we are overly generous and assume that Statcounter is installed on 1% of all Chinese websites—a huge leap—that still only brings the total to around 38,800 websites.

In a market with 1.092 billion internet users and 827 million search engine users, such a small sample size simply cannot provide an accurate or meaningful representation of China’s vast online activity. The reality is that Statcounter’s low adoption means its data is likely skewed, capturing a very limited slice of the Chinese internet. The numbers just don’t add up when compared to the scale of the market it’s attempting to measure.

Questioning Statcounter’s Reported Data for China

Statcounter reports tracking 213 million page views (sample data for July 2022) from China, which, when you look at the size of the Chinese internet, seems strangely low.

With over a billion internet users and millions of active websites, that number feels way off. It’s hard to believe that this small slice could represent anything close to the actual scale of online activity in the country.

Why is the number so low? One explanation might be that the data is coming from less popular websites, ones that aren’t getting much traffic.

Even worse, it could be that a lot of these page views come from foreign websites visited by users in China, or simply browsing international content.

The result? Statcounter’s numbers could be heavily skewed toward a niche subset of users, rather than the mainstream Chinese internet user.

This means the average Chinese internet user, the one browsing Baidu, Taobao, or Weibo on a daily basis, is likely underrepresented or even completely missed in this data.

What we’re seeing in Statcounter’s reports is a sliver of the market, not the big picture.

And when you’re trying to understand search engine market shares in China, having such an incomplete view can lead to serious misjudgments.

Statcounter’s Limitations in Capturing True User Behavior in China

Most Chinese websites don’t rely on tools like Statcounter. Instead, they use Baidu Analytics (Baidu Tongji), which is much better suited to the local ecosystem. It’s integrated seamlessly with Baidu’s search engine, and because it’s hosted within China, it complies with all the country’s data regulations. Statcounter, being a niche tool, just doesn’t have the same relevance or adoption.

Then there’s the issue of VPNs. Plenty of people in China use VPNs to access blocked sites like Google or YouTube. The thing is, when someone uses a VPN, their traffic gets rerouted through servers in other countries.

So, while Statcounter might be picking up those users, they could be mistakenly assigned to the wrong location. A user in Shanghai browsing Google might show up as someone in San Francisco or Singapore. This kind of misattribution can make a real mess of the data (for Chinese from China).

What does that leave us with? Huge gaps. Statcounter can’t capture the majority of Chinese internet users or their true behaviors.

It’s not getting a proper read on the millions of people using Baidu or the vast majority of local websites. The data it does collect is incomplete at best, and at worst, it’s flat-out misleading.

If you’re trying to figure out search engine market shares in China based on this, you’re probably getting the wrong story.

Final Thoughts: Why Our Targeted Approach Outperforms Broad Tools Like Statcounter

To sum it up, Statcounter’s low adoption rate among Chinese websites, combined with factors like VPN misattribution and reliance on foreign websites, makes its data highly unreliable when it comes to understanding search engine market shares in China. The tool simply doesn’t have enough presence in the local ecosystem to provide a meaningful view of user behavior or search engine usage.

So, what should businesses do? Instead of relying on Statcounter, it’s crucial to turn to more representative, local sources. Analytics tools like Baidu Tongji or even data directly from GA4 (when used correctly on purely Chinese websites) will provide a clearer, more accurate picture of what’s really going on in China’s search engine landscape (ideally across a larger number of websites – like we do it).

Our approach is to use GA4 and Baidu Tongji data from our China SEO clients. We make sure to only pull data from purely Chinese websites, meaning we skip multilingual ones that may skew results.

china search engine market shares

We also don’t worry about the geo-location of visitors, because Simplified Chinese—the language these websites are written in—is primarily used by people in mainland China (with some exceptions, like Singapore).

The major search engines can understand which version of Chinese is being used in a query and tend to favor pages written in Simplified Chinese for users in China. So, we know the data is relevant to the market.

Now, it’s fair to say that some of the critiques we’ve made about Statcounter could be thrown back at us. Yes, we do analyze fewer websites than Statcounter, but we’re confident in the quality of the data we’re looking at.

These aren’t niche, low-traffic websites—these are legitimate, high-traffic B2B websites, and that’s exactly the segment of the market we specialize in. The B2B sector is a major part of SEO for China, so while our data pool may be smaller, it’s far more relevant to our target audience.

In conclusion, while there may be limitations in any method, our focus on accurate, targeted data from trusted sources ensures that we provide the most reliable insights into search engine market shares in China. It’s about quality over quantity, and understanding the market you’re serving.


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Kun Tang, Founder and CEO

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