How DeepSeek search finds and scores websites: what we measured on our own site

Updated 2026-10-21

Short answer: DeepSeek’s search engine, the one behind web search on chat.deepseek.com, can now be queried directly through an API, and every result comes back with an authority score from 0 to 4. When we queried our own domain on 2026-10-20, it returned nothing. What DeepSeek found about us came from GitHub, X and Product Hunt, not from our website.

What launched on 2026-10-17

• Two developer APIs: POST /v1/tools/search returns up to 50 ranked web results for a query, and POST /v1/tools/fetch returns one page as Markdown. Details are in DeepSeek’s Search & Fetch guide.
• DeepSeek’s changelog says the same in-house engine powers search on its website and in its API.
• Each result carries authority (0 to 4, 3 or above is “highly authoritative”, -1 is unknown), rerank_score (0 to 3, combining relevance, authority and freshness, 1.5 or above is “high quality”), and a date.
• Queries accept site:, -site:, quoted phrases, lang:, and after: / before:.
• Price: $0.75 (RMB 5) per 1,000 successful requests for each API. Server-side calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex are unbilled until 2026-11-01 00:00 Beijing time.
• What we did not find: a submission form, sitemap upload, IndexNow support, a webmaster tool, or a published crawler name.

What we measured

2026-10-20, about 18:20 Beijing time. 19 queries, one request each, count=50, a fixed location hint (Chinese queries used a mainland address, English ones a US address). 4 queries used our name, 11 were generic buyer questions in Chinese and English, 4 were extra category and brand terms.

The 18 queries that returned results gave 889 results in total. Authority split 30 at 4, 431 at 3, 373 at 2 and 55 at 1. 188 results (21%) had no date.

Authority looked like a score per host

In our sample every page on the same host had the same authority, with two exceptions noted below. That matches an independent test of 4,322 results published on 2026-10-17. DeepSeek itself has not said how the score is set.

The same independent test reports that adding after: or before: to a query drops every page that has no date. We have not tested that ourselves.

What this means for a brand

1. Get indexed first. With zero pages in the index, authority does not matter yet. A new site depends on being linked from pages DeepSeek already knows.
2. Use high-authority hosts, with the same facts everywhere. For us, the GitHub repo did the work the website could not. Say what you are, who it is for and what it costs the same way on each profile, and link back to your site.
3. Date your pages. Show an update date and put datePublished and dateModified in the structured data. We added both to every question page on 2026-10-21.
4. Don’t block crawlers by accident. DeepSeek documents no crawler name, so a blanket rule against unknown bots can shut it out.
5. Re-test with the same queries. One run is a snapshot. Keep the query list fixed and compare.

What not to do is on DeepSeek and “GEO manipulation”.

Where we fit

The $99 Starter covers six engines, including DeepSeek, with up to 10 of your buyer questions, a competitor comparison, the sources each answer cited, and a written fix list. The free sample is ChatGPT only, up to 5 questions, with a short summary.