How to appear in DeepSeek and get your brand cited
DeepSeek documents far less than OpenAI, Anthropic or Google about how it reads the web. What it does publish, what that lets a company do, and what still cannot be measured.
Published 29 September 2026
Short answer
Appearing in DeepSeek depends on two routes that are worked on separately: what the model learned from the public web during training, and what it finds when it searches during a conversation. DeepSeek states that it trains on Common Crawl, an open archive of the web, and that its search mode runs on third-party search APIs it does not name. That makes the levers a company controls indirect: let Common Crawl’s crawler in, be well indexed in general search engines, and describe the brand the same way everywhere. Nobody can promise attributable results in this engine today, and anyone who does deserves suspicion.
What is appearing in DeepSeek
DefinitionAppearing in DeepSeek is the result of the assistant from the Chinese company DeepSeek naming a brand, describing it or recommending it inside an answer. It is not a position in a list of results, and it cannot be bought or requested.
DeepSeek is both a conversational assistant, with its own website and app, and a family of language models that anyone can download. The company behind it, Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, publishes the weights of its models: the trained model itself, ready to be installed on someone else’s servers.
For a brand, that means DeepSeek is not one place to appear in. It is the official assistant, and it is also every other company’s product that runs the same model underneath, with its knowledge frozen on the date it was trained.
What DeepSeek documents about how it reads the web
DocumentationDeepSeek documents little, and what it does sits in two legal texts: the public summary of training content for DeepSeek-V4 and its privacy policy. Neither gives the name of its crawler, its IP addresses or a control built for publishers.
The training content summary for DeepSeek-V4, the model the company placed on the European Union market on 24 April 2026, says that “the crawler is designed to respect robots.txt instructions and other standard web protocols”. The same document adds that it is not designed to get around captchas, paywalls or password-protected content, and records that DeepSeek has not signed the EU Code of Practice for general-purpose AI models.
DeepSeek’s privacy policy, last updated on 10 February 2026, covers search mode in one line: the company integrates third-party APIs to provide search services and shares the keywords a person types with them. It does not say which search engine sits behind it.
What a marketing lead will not find in DeepSeek’s documentation, checked on 29 September 2026:
- The name of the agent it crawls with, so it can be allowed or blocked on its own in robots.txt.
- A list of IP ranges to let it through the firewall.
- A control that separates training from search, like the ones OpenAI publishes for ChatGPT and Google for Gemini.
- A report for site owners showing how often a page appears in its answers.
The two routes to appear in DeepSeek and how they differ
ComparisonDeepSeek answers either from what its model already knows or from what it finds when it searches, and each route has its own source, its own date and its own lever. Third-party deployments inherit only the first.
| Route | Where the information comes from | Up to which date | What a company can do |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the model knows | Publicly available internet data, including Common Crawl and Stack Exchange, plus licensed data | Some data collected approximately no later than May 2025 | Not block CCBot, and get other sites to describe the brand the way it describes itself |
| Search mode | Results from third-party search APIs that DeepSeek does not name | Whatever is published and indexed on the day of the question | Be well indexed in general search engines and answer each question in text |
| Third-party deployments | The same model weights, installed by another company | The training date of the model that was installed | The same as the first route: there is nothing to switch on in each product |
The difference in dates is what confuses people most. A page published today can show up in DeepSeek’s search mode as soon as the search engine behind it indexes the page, but it will not enter what the model knows from memory until DeepSeek trains another model on more recent data.
Where DeepSeek gets what it knows about a brand
TrainingDeepSeek learns what it knows about a brand from the public web, and the only web archive it names is Common Crawl. Its DeepSeek-V4 data summary explicitly lists Common Crawl and Stack Exchange, within more than 10 trillion tokens of training text, tokens being the units a model splits text into.
Common Crawl is a non-profit foundation that crawls the web and publishes the result as an open archive. Its August 2026 archive, released on 24 August, holds 2.14 billion web pages from 33.1 million registered domains, crawled between 7 and 20 August 2026.
Common Crawl’s crawler is called CCBot and it honours robots.txt: the foundation itself documents the rule that blocks it. A site that blocks CCBot drops out of that archive and, with it, out of one of the sources DeepSeek says it trains on.
The DeepSeek-V4 summary adds that data goes through quality screening, deduplication and language identification before training. Put in brand terms: one page on its own counts for little, and what carries weight is many different pages saying the same thing about the brand.
How to appear in DeepSeek step by step
The four stepsFour steps, in this order, that a company can ask of whoever runs its website and communications. The first two are technical and depend only on the company; the last two are slow and depend on others too.
- 01 / ARCHIVE
Step 1: check that robots.txt does not block CCBot
robots.txt is the text file where a site tells each crawler what it may download. Common Crawl itself warned in August 2025 that many SEOs block CCBot without realising it, and that block removes the site from the archive DeepSeek uses. Blocking it is legitimate, but it should be a decision, not an inheritance.
- 02 / ACCESS
Step 2: check the firewall, not just robots.txt
A bot-protection rule on the CDN, the service that delivers the site from servers around the world, can stop a crawler that robots.txt allows. Since DeepSeek publishes neither its agent’s name nor its IPs, the only thing that can be verified is that the site answers legitimate crawlers the way it answers a browser.
- 03 / SEARCH
Step 3: be well indexed in general search engines
DeepSeek’s search mode runs on third-party search APIs, so a page that no general search engine has indexed cannot reach that answer. What helps after that is the same as in any engine: the answer in text at the top of each section, and figures with their source next to them.
- 04 / BRAND
Step 4: describe the brand the same way everywhere
One sentence saying what the company does, for whom and where, repeated word for word on its site, its profiles, the directories of its sector and forums such as Stack Exchange where the company takes part. A model that has read many similar descriptions repeats that one; a model that has read many different ones hedges.
What changes because DeepSeek publishes open weights
Open weightsOpen weights mean other companies run DeepSeek inside their own products, and that copy of DeepSeek knows as much about a brand as it did on the day it was trained. DeepSeek releases its weights under the MIT License, which allows anyone to download and deploy them freely.
The reach is real. On Hugging Face, the public repository where DeepSeek publishes its models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro showed 449,070 downloads in the last month as of 29 September 2026. Amazon Bedrock, the model service of Amazon Web Services, offered three DeepSeek models on that date: V3.2, V3.1 and R1.
For a brand, the consequence is about timing. A product running DeepSeek-V3.1 keeps repeating what that model learned, even if the company has since changed its name, its price or its offer. Those deployments cannot be corrected one by one; only the website can, so the next model learns the right version.
How to appear in DeepSeek if you sell in China or Asia
Chinese marketIf the company sells in China, or to customers who ask in Chinese, a Chinese version of its key pages stops being optional. DeepSeek describes its training data as multilingual, with strong coverage in Chinese and English.
A brand that exists only in English or Spanish competes in Chinese with whatever others have written about it in that language, if anyone has. Translating the product page, the pricing page and the definition sentence is the minimum for the model to have something of the brand’s own to read.
DeepSeek’s Chinese-language privacy policy, dated 10 February 2026, confirms that search mode exists in that market too. It does not say which search engine sits behind it either, so the rule is the same: be indexed in the search engines that audience uses.
What can be measured about presence in DeepSeek
MeasurementPresence in DeepSeek is much harder to measure than in other engines, and that is worth knowing before hiring anyone. DeepSeek offers no report for site owners, and without the name of its crawler its visits cannot be isolated in server logs either.
What can be checked today about a brand’s presence in DeepSeek:
- What the assistant says about the brand when asked about its category, with search switched on and switched off. The two answers measure the two routes.
- Whether the site lets CCBot in, and whether the firewall does too, not only robots.txt.
- Which visits arrive from DeepSeek’s assistant domain, in web analytics set up to separate that source.
- What customers answer to “how did you find us?”, the only attribution that depends on no provider.
What cannot be done is promise an attributable result. Anyone promising presence in DeepSeek within a set time frame is promising something that not even DeepSeek’s own documentation allows anyone to verify.
Keep reading
Do you know what DeepSeek says about your brand?
DoGeo checks whether your site lets in the crawler DeepSeek learns from, whether your firewall is stopping it without anyone having decided so, and how the sources a model can read describe you. It takes four details: your name, your company, your website and a work email.