Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen, DeepSeek, and ByteDance’s Doubao are transforming e-commerce—and with it, the conditions for European brands in China. Product search, recommendations, customer service, marketing, and livestreaming are increasingly driven by AI. As a result, brand visibility is being influenced more and more by algorithms.
This is particularly evident at Alibaba. Qwen has been linked to billions of products on Taobao and Tmall. Instead of searching for products using keywords as they did before, consumers can now express their preferences through dialogue. The AI agent asks about preferences, compares offers, and recommends suitable products. As a result, AI is emerging as a new gatekeeper between the brand and the consumer. Complete product data, precise descriptions, reviews, and clearly articulated unique selling propositions are increasingly determining whether a brand is even considered and recommended by such systems.
For European companies, this means that brands must in the future not only be attractive to people but also understandable to machines. Origin, quality, technology, design, sustainability, and special materials are often at the core of European brands’ positioning. These characteristics must be presented in Chinese product information so clearly and consistently that AI systems can recognize them and take them into account when making recommendations. In addition to traditional SEO and platform marketing, this creates a new task: AI Brand Visibility.
At the same time, AI facilitates market entry. Chinese tools generate product images, translations, descriptions, and marketing campaigns, while digital avatars can serve as virtual brand ambassadors to showcase products around the clock. This opens up opportunities—particularly for smaller European brands—that previously required substantial budgets and large local teams.
However, this development has a downside. Generative AI also makes it easier to imitate logos, packaging, product images, claims, and entire campaign styles. As a result, digital brand monitoring is gaining importance alongside traditional trademark registration. Companies must increasingly monitor visually or semantically similar content, as well as AI-generated content that imitates or dilutes their brand identity. China’s e-commerce sector is thus evolving into an AI-mediated brand market. In the future, what matters will no longer be just which platforms a brand is present on, but also what the AI knows about it, how it categorizes its products, and whether it recommends them. Successful brand management in China must therefore reach three audiences simultaneously: Chinese consumers, the platform, and the AI in between.
China Intellectual Property Blog 