Baidu Cuts Search AI API to 4.9 Yuan per 1,000 Calls, Claims Search Now Self-Evolves

Baidu launched an upgraded search AI API on October 30 with a promotional price of 4.9 yuan per 1,000 calls for its enhanced search package, and says its search engine now improves itself from live user feedback. The announcement came at a Baidu app product briefing in Beijing, as reported by Pandaily. Baidu says the price undercuts DeepSeek's search API.

Pricing

According to the Baidu AI Cloud campaign page:

• Enhanced search package: 4.9 yuan per 1,000 calls during a promotion running October 30 to December 31. List price is 40 yuan per 1,000 calls.
• Purchase cap: Buyers can make repeated purchases up to a cumulative 1 million calls. After that, usage is billed at list price.
• Flagship package: 9.9 yuan per 1,000 calls, down from 72 yuan. It requires an invitation code.

Results return the site, title, URL and source snippet so answers can be checked.

Recursive self-evolution

Baidu describes the mechanism as a closed loop of retrieval, feedback and retraining. Every real search and the user feedback that follows are turned into training signals and fed back into the system, so the models keep iterating without manual intervention. Baidu claims multiple agents improve together through this online loop and that overall iteration efficiency is up more than 80 percent. The company did not publish independent evaluations of the claim.

Four-layer architecture

The API runs on what Baidu calls a four-layer AI-native architecture:

• Content layer: More than 80 languages and an index of hundreds of billions of quality pages. Baidu says data credibility is up more than 50 percent.
• Engine layer: Where the self-evolution runs.
• Architecture layer: Handles high concurrency and low latency for enterprise use.
• Application layer: Supports access through an API, MCP and skills.

Baidu says its own assistant gained 20 percent in quality after connecting to the API.

Consumer app changes

The briefing also covered the Baidu app. Baidu says search is moving from one question and one answer to one task and one deliverable. Complex questions are handled with multi-step lookups that return a verified summary, routine tasks are completed directly, and long-running topics can be tracked with alerts once the user agrees. The capability covers more than 170 tool scenarios.

Interactive results pages now appear in five times as many scenarios and draw on more than 5 billion data resources from government services, public utilities and the central bank. The AI camera can now track multiple objects at once and hold live conversations in nine Chinese dialects, including Northeastern, Sichuanese and Cantonese.

What this means

The pricing terms matter more than the headline rate. The 4.9 yuan figure applies only to the enhanced package, only through December 31, and only up to a cumulative 1 million calls, after which the 40 yuan list price applies. The 9.9 yuan flagship tier is gated by invitation code. Developers budgeting for production use should plan around list pricing.

The self-evolution and quality figures (80 percent iteration efficiency, 50 percent credibility, 20 percent assistant quality) are Baidu's own claims, and no independent evaluation has been published. The DeepSeek price comparison is likewise Baidu's framing.

For builders, the practical detail is the output format. Each result returns site, title, URL and source snippet, which lets applications show citations and verify answers. Access through API, MCP and skills means the product can be connected to agent frameworks without custom integration.