Tencent’s Marketing Services revenue rose 22% year on year to RMB43.57 billion in the second quarter of 2026, as the technology group expanded the use of artificial intelligence across advertising recommendation, campaign automation and digital search.
Tencent reported total quarterly revenue of RMB204.79 billion, up 11% year on year, in results released on 12 August 2026. Marketing Services was one of its fastest-growing major business areas during the period.
The figures are significant for the wider marketing industry because Tencent is increasingly deploying AI beyond content generation and into the systems that determine which advertisements, products and information users see.
According to Xinhua News Agency’s reporting on Tencent’s Q2 results, the company’s AIM+ intelligent advertising platform maintained customer coverage above 80%. AI-supported creative capabilities increased advertising-material production efficiency by nearly 80%.
Tencent has also increased the scale of the technology behind advertising recommendations. Xinhua reported that, in Video Accounts advertising, its next-generation ranking model expanded 30-fold in scale while computing volume increased 24-fold, with related capabilities subsequently extended to Official Accounts and Mini Programs.
“AI is moving further into the infrastructure behind digital marketing,” said Ms Emma Chen, China Social Media Manager at Gogetop Marketing. “It is no longer only helping marketers create content. It is increasingly influencing what users discover, what is recommended to them and how advertising is delivered.”
Search behaviour is changing at the same time.
Earlier in 2026, Tencent reported that total query volume on Weixin Search had increased by more than 25% year on year, benefiting from LLM-powered ranking and broader AI-search coverage. Tencent also said total time spent on Video Accounts grew by more than 20% year on year.
Independent industry data point in a similar direction.
QuestMobile’s 2026 Internet Advertising Market Half-Year Report, published on 18 August, estimates that China’s internet advertising market reached RMB385.34 billion in the first half of 2026, up 7.1% year on year.
The research group recorded 1.39 billion interactions with AI-related keyword content during the period and identified AI-related content as the largest traffic hotspot of the first half.
More importantly for search marketing, QuestMobile identified AI question-and-answer services replacing traditional search engines as one of the emerging marketing-entry trends for the second half of 2026. During China’s 618 shopping period, it observed AI services becoming more closely connected with e-commerce platforms, allowing users in some cases to progress from AI assistance to product selection and ordering.
The trend sits alongside the continuing growth of social search.
RedNote (Xiaohongshu), one of China’s leading lifestyle and discovery platforms, reports more than 350 million monthly active users on its official business platform. Its internal data also show that 73% of users search on the platform each month, around 90% of content is user-generated and more than 100 million users share content. The MAU figure is dated December 2024, with the remaining figures dated September 2024.
For international brands, these behaviours are making the Chinese discovery journey increasingly different from a conventional search-engine funnel. A consumer may first discover a product through a recommendation feed, search for experiences on RedNote, encounter content within Weixin, consult an AI service and only later visit the brand’s website or purchasing channel.
The platforms remain separate ecosystems; the significance is not technical integration between them, but the broader change in how consumers find and assess information.
Traditional SEO therefore remains relevant, but marketers are increasingly considering how accurate brand information can also be understood by AI-powered search and answer systems. Industry terms such as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) have emerged to describe parts of this developing field.
“For overseas companies entering China, the practical issue is not the terminology,” Chen added. “What matters is whether customers can find consistent, credible and locally relevant information about a brand wherever they begin their search. As AI becomes more involved in discovery, information quality and authority become even more important.”
Tencent’s latest results suggest that this transition is moving beyond experimentation. The combination of 22% growth in Marketing Services, expanding AI advertising infrastructure, rising Weixin Search activity and QuestMobile’s findings on AI-led discovery provides growing evidence that competition for digital visibility in China is extending beyond the traditional search-results page.
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