Are you trying to build trust for your brand in China, not just visibility? Then you need to look at Zhihu (知乎), China’s biggest question and answer platform. It is not flashy. Nobody scrolls Zhihu for fun the way they scroll Xiaohongshu or Douyin. People go there with a real question, often right before they buy something, and they read carefully. That makes it one of the most useful platforms in China for brands selling anything that needs explaining: equipment, supplements, software, financial services, cars, anything B2B.
In this guide I will show you what changed on Zhihu since we first wrote about it, why it now overlaps with AI search tools like DeepSeek, and how to run a seeding campaign that does not read like an ad. Keep reading.
Philip Chen is the CEO of GMA, a marketing agency based in China. He has spent the last decade helping foreign brands get found by Chinese buyers before they even start comparing suppliers.
What Is Zhihu, And Why Does It Still Matter In 2026
Zhihu is China’s largest Q&A platform. Users ask a question, and other users, sometimes experts, sometimes just well-read people, answer it in detail. It has been around since 2011 and it built its reputation on long, careful answers instead of quick reactions. Other Q&A spaces exist in China, like Baidu Tieba and Baidu Zhidao, but Zhihu stayed the one where people expect a real answer, not a one-liner.
What makes Zhihu different from every other Chinese platform is who reads it. The user base skews educated, professional, and willing to spend real time reading before making a decision. That is a small audience compared to Douyin’s billion scrolls a day, but it is the audience doing the actual comparing before a purchase, especially for anything expensive or technical.
Zhihu Is Where Chinese Buyers Check Before They Buy
Here is the part most brands miss. Zhihu is not a top of funnel platform. It is a research platform. Someone already saw your ad on Douyin, or your product on Tmall, or heard about your brand from a colleague. Before they buy, especially if it costs more than a few hundred yuan or if it is a B2B purchase, they open Zhihu and search your brand name, your category, or a comparison question. If you are not there, or worse, if the only thing there is a competitor answering the question for you, you lose the sale right at the moment it mattered most.
This is even more true for B2B. A factory manager comparing filtration systems, a hospital procurement officer comparing medical devices, a CFO comparing SaaS tools, all of them will search Zhihu before they get on a call with your sales team. We wrote a longer piece on how B2B buying works differently in China if you want the full picture, worth a read before you plan your Zhihu content.
One more thing worth knowing: Zhihu stopped publishing its monthly active user count in its financial reports, so treat any exact user number you see online with some caution. What the company does report is more telling. In its first quarter of 2026, Zhihu posted revenue of 651.6 million yuan and, more importantly, an adjusted net profit of 17.2 million yuan, up 147% year over year. Paid content and IP operation, which includes the 盐选 (Yanxuan) paid subscription library, brought in 402 million yuan, now 61.7% of total revenue. Zhihu is smaller than it was five years ago, but it makes more money per user than it used to, and that money now comes mostly from people paying for good content, not from banner ads. That tells you something about the kind of platform it has become: smaller, but more trusted by the people who stay.
Zhihu Content Is Now Feeding AI Search Too
This is the part that changed the most since our last update, and it is why Zhihu deserves fresh attention in 2026. When Chinese users ask DeepSeek, Doubao, or Baidu’s AI tools a technical or comparison question, these AI search engines need to pull an answer from somewhere. Most of them favor their own group’s content first (Doubao leans on Toutiao, Baidu leans on its own network), but for anything technical or niche, Zhihu answers show up as sources surprisingly often, alongside CSDN and GitHub. That is a direct effect of Zhihu’s format: long, structured, well-sourced answers are exactly what an AI model wants to quote.
Zhihu also built its own AI answer product, called 知乎直答 (Zhihu Zhida), which pulls from the platform’s own answer base to give one-shot AI answers instead of a list of links. In its Q1 2026 results, Zhihu reported that direct monthly active users of Zhida grew more than 260% year over year, with next-month retention up around 83%. That is a platform betting hard on being the answer engine, not just the answer forum.
What this means for your brand: a well-written Zhihu answer today is not just for Zhihu readers. It can end up quoted inside DeepSeek’s answer, inside Zhihu Zhida’s own summary, or pulled into a Baidu AI Overview. We cover this shift in more detail, across platforms, in our guide on GEO in China. If your brand is invisible to AI search tools right now, Zhihu is one of the fastest ways to fix that, because it is a platform these models already trust as a source.
The tech and AI crowd on Zhihu is not small either. The platform counts around 16 million users who keep coming back to tech and AI discussions, 3.65 million of them classed as deep creators in that space, and more than 50 million monthly active users following tech, internet, and AI content at least once a month. If your product touches software, hardware, or anything with a technical spec sheet, this is the exact audience reading and, increasingly, the exact audience an AI model is learning from when it answers a question about your category.
What Makes A Zhihu Answer Actually Work
A few things haven’t changed since Zhihu launched, and they still decide whether your content gets read or ignored:
1. Depth over speed. A rushed 100-word answer gets buried. A well-researched 800-word answer with real numbers or a real example rises to the top and stays there for years.
2. Verified accounts carry more weight. Zhihu checks who you say you are. An account tied to a real job title or company gets read differently than an anonymous one.
3. Topics are organized, not chased by hashtags. Users follow topics they care about, which means the right answer under the right topic keeps getting found months or years later.
4. Paid content exists alongside free answers. Through 盐选 (Yanxuan), Zhihu’s paid membership library, top writers can publish long columns behind a paywall. It works a bit like a mix of Medium and a subscription newsletter, and some brands use it for deeper thought leadership content that free answers cannot fit.
How To Run A Real Zhihu Seeding Campaign (Not An Ad Campaign)
The word for this in China is 种草, which means “planting grass”, basically seeding an idea so it grows into a purchase decision on its own. On Zhihu, seeding means answering real existing questions with real information, not posting content that reads like a sales page. Here is how we run it for clients:
1. Find the actual questions being asked. Use Zhihu’s search and the topic pages in your industry. Look for questions with high view counts but weak existing answers. That gap is your opening.
2. Answer with a mix of voices. Do not only use your brand account. Work with a small group of real, verified accounts (engineers, users, industry professionals) who can answer honestly, including mentioning your product where it genuinely fits, alongside your own account answering more directly.
3. Lead with the information, not the pitch. A good seeded answer explains how to choose between three types of a product, and only mentions your brand as one credible option with a clear reason why. Readers, and increasingly AI search tools, can tell the difference between a real comparison and a disguised ad within a paragraph.
4. Say who you are. Zhihu’s rules require disclosure of brand affiliation, and honestly it works better anyway. An answer that says “I work in this industry, here is what I would look at” reads as more trustworthy than a hidden pitch, and it keeps you off Zhihu’s moderation radar.
5. Keep it updated. A good Zhihu answer keeps getting views for years. Go back every few months and add new information, new numbers, a new example. Old answers with fresh edits often outperform brand new ones.
A Real Example: How One B2B Brand Used Zhihu Seeding
Let me tell you about a client I will call Julie, who runs a European industrial air filtration brand. Her products sell to factories through a thin network of Chinese distributors, and most of her China marketing so far was WeChat posts that only reached people who already knew the brand. The problem was upstream of that: factory procurement teams researching new suppliers found almost nothing about her company outside her own sales deck.
We ran a 90-day Zhihu seeding project. Instead of buying ads, we found the real questions procurement engineers were already typing into Zhihu, things like “how to choose an industrial dust extraction system” and “filtration system comparison for factory workshops”. Five verified engineer accounts and one account tied openly to the brand’s China representative answered these questions properly: spec comparisons, maintenance cost breakdowns, real installation photos, no pitch.
Within three months, four of those answers ranked in the top three results for their questions, and two got pulled directly into a Baidu AI search summary. The China distributor tracked 11 new supplier inquiries back to Zhihu referral links, and three turned into signed orders. What made it work was not the number of posts. It was that the answers read like engineers talking to engineers, not marketing talking to a lead.
Common Mistakes Foreign Brands Make On Zhihu
We see the same three mistakes over and over. First, brands treat Zhihu like a broadcast channel and post company announcements instead of answering questions, which gets almost no reach because nobody searches for a press release. Second, brands write one polished answer and stop, when Zhihu rewards accounts that keep showing up under different questions over months. Third, brands hire a single cheap freelancer to blast out dozens of shallow answers, which Zhihu’s spam detection catches fast and which reads as fake to any careful buyer anyway. The accounts that do well on Zhihu tend to look boring from the outside: a handful of real people, answering real questions, consistently, for a long time.
Zhihu’s Ad Products In 2026
Seeding works best combined with paid tools, not instead of them. Here is what is available on Zhihu right now:
1. 知+ (Zhihu Plus), the native ad product that lets brands boost their own answers or articles so they show up higher in relevant searches and feeds, without looking like a banner ad.
2. Feed ads (信息流广告), the standard scroll ads. Zhihu tightened the rules on these in 2026: accounts now need a minimum opening deposit of 10,000 yuan, and the platform added AI-driven targeting and more campaign objective options, alongside stricter content review.
3. 芝士 (Zhishi, meaning “cheese”, a play on the word for knowledge), Zhihu’s content commercialization platform. It gives brands access to a pool of more than 3.7 million active creators and over 5,600 top writers across 37-plus fields, for tasks like sponsored answers, custom articles, video content, or roundtable events. This is the main channel for structured seeding campaigns at scale.
4. Live sessions and roundtables, still useful for direct engagement, especially for launches or when you want an expert from your company to answer live questions on record.
Staying Authentic (Zhihu’s Community Will Notice If You Do Not)
Zhihu users are quick to call out obvious ads in the comments, and once that happens the answer is basically dead. Keep it honest: disclose your affiliation, answer the actual question first, and only bring up your product where it genuinely helps. This is a different posture from a platform like Xiaohongshu, where a bit of polish and personality goes further. We compare content approaches across platforms in our Xiaohongshu marketing guide if you want to see the difference side by side.
Follow Zhihu’s community rules too: no hate speech, no plagiarism, and no answers that are obviously just a commercial post with no real content. Getting flagged means your account, and sometimes your brand’s other accounts, lose credibility fast.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is Zhihu different from Xiaohongshu or Weibo for brand marketing?
Zhihu is not a place for pretty pictures or quick reactions, unlike Xiaohongshu or Weibo. People come with a real question and a research mindset, often right before a purchase decision. That makes it the strongest platform for high consideration and B2B products, equipment, software, health, finance, where buyers want a straight, detailed answer rather than a mood board. If your product needs proof more than a nice photo, Zhihu is where you build that proof.
Do we need a Chinese business license to advertise on Zhihu?
Yes, for official ad products like 知+ or feed ads, you need an ICP-registered mainland China entity, and accounts now start at a 10,000 yuan minimum deposit. If you do not have a China entity yet, you can still run a seeding campaign through vetted creator accounts and an agency of record. That is how most foreign brands start on Zhihu before setting up locally.
How long before a Zhihu campaign shows real results?
Zhihu moves slower than Douyin or Xiaohongshu, because good answers take longer to rank and readers take longer to trust them. Plan for 8 to 12 weeks before you see steady traffic to your best answers, and 3 to 6 months before it shows up in actual sales conversations or RFQs. The upside: a good Zhihu answer keeps working for years, unlike a short video that dies within a week.
We Are Experts In Zhihu Marketing, Contact Us
We have run Zhihu seeding campaigns for brands selling everything from industrial filtration to sleep supplements, and the pattern holds: the answers that work are the ones that read like a person who knows the industry, not a brand trying to sell something.
If your brand is invisible on Zhihu right now, or invisible to the AI search tools now pulling from it, that is exactly the gap we close for clients every month. We plan the questions worth answering, staff the right verified voices, and track what turns into actual leads.
Want a free look at what buyers in your category are already asking on Zhihu? Contact us and we will show you the gaps before your competitors close them.
Sources
- 新浪财经 (Sina Finance), “知乎：2026年第一季度营收6.52亿元 经调整净利润1716万元”, June 3, 2026: finance.sina.com.cn
- Fuyuan7, “豆包、DeepSeek、元宝等主流 AI 搜索引用来源深度解析与 GEO 实操指南”: fuyuan7.com
