Riding the DeepSeek wave: Tencent Yuanbao's marketing blitz to stay in the A...

by Lu Keyan

On February 22, Tencent Yuanbao’s downloads surpassed Bytedance‘s Doubao, climbing to second place on China’s Apple App Store free app rankings, trailing only DeepSeek. This marks Yuanbao’s first time overtaking Doubao.

The surge is driven by Tencent’s aggressive marketing. Since integrating DeepSeek-R1, Tencent has ramped up advertising across WeChat, Bilibili, and Zhihu, even securing Baidu’s “deepseek” keyword ad placements.

According to DataEye, before February 15, Doubao and Kimi’s ad volumes exceeded Yuanbao’s by two to three times. However, on February 15, Tencent increased Yuanbao’s ad spend, with a major spike on February 18. The app’s single-day ad creatives peaked at over 11,000, making it the most aggressively marketed among the three. Between February 18 and 23, Yuanbao’s ad volume surged 345.1% month-over-month.

Another bold move came from WeChat, which had been testing an AI-powered search feature enhanced by DeepSeek-R1. However, due to traffic overload causing performance issues, WeChat redirected users to download Yuanbao for the DeepSeek-R1 experience.

Such an aggressive approach is rare for Tencent.

Historically, Tencent has been perceived as slow in the AI race. It was the last among China’s major internet giants to launch a proprietary large language model and consumer-facing AI app. As recently as Q3 2024, DataEye estimated Tencent Yuanbao’s iOS downloads at just 1.18 million—far behind Doubao’s 71.68 million and Kimi’s 30.16 million.

A Tencent insider previously told Jiemian Newsthat due to uncertainties around large language models’ commercial viability, Tencent long treated the sector as a defensive play. While it launched the Hunyuan model and Yuanbao app, its marketing remained conservative, largely confined to its own ecosystem. It wasn’t until early 2025 that Tencent began restructuring its AI business and integrating products.

Tencent’s earlier caution reflected internal strategy. In 2023, CEO Pony Ma remarked that in a transformation as profound as the industrial revolution, launching a product a month earlier is less important than solid algorithms, computing power, and real-world applications.

DeepSeek catalyzed Tencent’s acceleration. After the Lunar New Year, the company swiftly integrated DeepSeek across multiple products, including Yuanbao and the typically cautious-to-update WeChat. In contrast, ByteDance and Alibaba took a measured approach, testing AI in select products while maintaining some independence for their in-house models.

Tencent’s AI strategy has clearly shifted. In January, Yuanbao moved from TEG (Technology Engineering Group) to CSIG (Cloud and Smart Industries Group), followed by the recent transfer of QQ Browser, Sogou Input, and ima, forming a more cohesive AI product lineup.

On the product side, Tencent has provided free DeepSeek-R1 services and launched its own inference model, Tencent Hunyuan T1, offering users an alternative. Yuanbao has also introduced text-to-image generation, leveraging DeepSeek’s image recognition for differentiation.

Both Tencent’s external ad blitz and internal ecosystem-driven traffic aim to capture users while riding DeepSeek’s momentum. While the surge has strained infrastructure and increased costs, Tencent sees it as a chance to gain an edge in user experience—buying time for its Hunyuan model to improve and securing its place in the AI race. Only by staying in the game can Tencent justify its investment.