How to Submit Your Website to 360 Search, and Why It Now Takes an ICP Filing

360 Search is one of China's largest general search engines after Baidu, and for most of its history a foreign company needed nothing more than a 360 account to add its site to 360's webmaster platform, verify it and submit a sitemap. That changed in 2026. Since April 2026 the platform refuses new sites without an ICP filing (ICP备案), the registration that only a site hosted in mainland China can get, and since 21 May 2026 it has been removing the unfiled sites it already held. This guide covers what 360 Search is, how much traffic it sends, what the ICP rule means for a site hosted abroad, and what still works without one.

What 360 Search is

360 Search runs at so.com. It belongs to the 360 group (三六零安全科技, listed in Shanghai as 601360), best known in China for its free antivirus suite and its web browser. So.com's own terms name the operator as Tianjin 360 Kuaikan Technology (360's page inclusion agreement).

It launched in August 2012 as the default search of the 360 browser and the hao.360.cn start page, replacing Google there. Between January 2015 and February 2016 it was renamed Haosou (好搜), and some tools still use that name: StatCounter lists it as "Haosou" to this day.

Its strength is the desktop. In its 2025 annual report the group puts both its PC security suite and its PC browser at around 400 million monthly users each, citing iResearch, and names the browser and 360 Search among its main traffic sources.

How much traffic it sends

StatCounter measured 360 at 12.35% of search referrals in China in September 2026, behind Baidu (46.72%) and Bing (21.73%) (StatCounter). Two things are worth knowing before you build a plan on that number:

It moves a lot. Over the twelve months to September 2026, 360's monthly figure ranged from 6.62% to 18.28%. Treat it as roughly one search referral in ten, not as a fixed rank.
It is a desktop engine. In September 2026 it had 21.68% of desktop referrals and 5.44% of mobile ones. If your buyers search from office PCs (B2B, procurement, education), 360 matters more than its average suggests. If they search on phones, it matters less.

StatCounter counts clicks from search results to sites that carry its tracking code, and few mainland Chinese sites do. Its sample leans towards foreign-facing sites, which is the view that matters to a foreign company, but it is not a census of Chinese search.

The ICP rule, from May 2026

On 20 April 2026 the 360 webmaster platform announced that, on the basis of MIIT filing data, it would no longer store newly submitted sites without a valid ICP filing, and would clear unfiled sites it already held. The grace period ended on 20 May 2026. From 21 May 2026, sites without a valid filing for more than 30 days were removed from the platform, and 360 says their data cannot be recovered.

In the console this shows up at the first step. Adding a site returns "no filing detected" (未检测到备案), and the verification button stays greyed out. Threads about exactly that fill 360's own webmaster forum from June to October 2026. When a user asked whether a site with an international certificate but no ICP filing could be added, the platform's moderator answered in one word: no. When another asked about a server in Hong Kong, the moderator explained that an ICP filing requires the server to be in mainland China, and that Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and every overseas server are excluded by the policy itself (360 webmaster forum, July 2026).

360's help pages still describe verification and sitemaps without mentioning the filing. The rule sits in the add-site step, so the help pages are no guide to whether your site will be accepted.

What an ICP filing is, and who can get one

Every website hosted in mainland China needs an ICP filing. It rests on two texts: the Measures for the Administration of Internet Information Services (State Council Order No. 292 of 2000) and the measures for non-commercial filing (Ministry of Information Industry Order No. 33, in force since 20 March 2005). A filing number looks like 京ICP备11001839号-1 and has to appear at the bottom of the home page. A separate ICP licence (ICP经营许可证) is required for paid online information services, and is harder to obtain.

In practice:

The filing is made by an organisation or individual in mainland China. Order No. 33 defines the regime that way, so a foreign company without a mainland entity (a subsidiary, a branch or a representative office) normally cannot file in its own name.
It goes through the mainland hosting provider, in Chinese, and the provider is not allowed to serve a site that has no filing.
A site hosted in Hong Kong or abroad needs no filing and cannot get one. That is the trap for most foreign companies: the Hong Kong server that makes a site fast in China is exactly what rules out the filing.
It takes weeks, once the rest is in place. The provincial review has up to 20 working days by law, and Tencent Cloud's own estimates run from about one to six weeks depending on the province. Setting up a mainland entity, if you do not have one, is a project of its own.

If you have an ICP filing: how submission works

If your company already has a mainland entity and a filed site, the process is quick:

Sign in at zhanzhang.so.com with a 360 account.
Add and verify the site. 360 offers three methods: a meta tag (360-site-verification), a file in the site root, or a CNAME record (360's verification help). The meta tag has to be live within six hours and the CNAME record expires after 24 hours; for an HTTPS site, 360 recommends the file or the CNAME.
Submit your sitemap. 360 takes XML, plain text and sitemap index files, in UTF-8 or GBK, up to 10 MB and 50,000 URLs per file (360's sitemap help). 360 says plainly that it does not guarantee to crawl or index every URL in it.
Optionally, apply for the official-site badge (官网认证). It requires an ICP filing in a company's name; a personal filing is not accepted (360's help).

Without an ICP filing: how 360 can still find your site

The rule closes the webmaster platform, not the index. 360's terms say its spider follows links from page to page and treats any site that does not opt out in robots.txt as indexable. On 29 October 2026, searches on so.com made from outside mainland China returned pages from python.org and from Estonian government sites, which have no ICP filing and almost certainly never submitted anything to 360.

So the work is the same as for any crawler that has to find you on its own:

Let 360Spider in. Check that robots.txt does not block it and that your firewall or CDN does not challenge it. 360 does not support reverse DNS checks; it publishes its crawler's IP ranges instead (360's spider page).
Make the site reachable from mainland China. Fonts, scripts and widgets served from Google or other blocked hosts can leave a page half loaded for the crawler and for readers.
Publish real Simplified Chinese pages, with titles and descriptions written in Chinese.
Get linked from Chinese sites that 360 already crawls: partners, distributors, directories and press in your industry.
Get into Baidu. Baidu still accepts a site without an ICP filing for domain verification and URL submission, and it has several times 360's traffic.

What you give up without a filing is control: no sitemap, no submission, no data on what 360 has indexed, and no say in how your site appears in results.

Before you start: a short checklist

Is your site hosted in mainland China? If not, there is no filing and no 360 webmaster account. Plan on crawling instead.
If it is, does the filing belong to a company? The official-site badge needs one.
Does robots.txt allow 360Spider, and does your firewall let 360's published IP ranges through?
Does the site load completely from inside mainland China?
Do your Chinese pages have Chinese titles and descriptions?
Is the site in Baidu?

Where we can help

We used to submit sites to 360 Search, Sogou and Toutiao Search alongside Baidu. We stopped in October 2026, because each of them now refuses to add a site without an ICP filing, and a site hosted outside mainland China cannot get one.

Baidu is different. It still accepts a site without a filing for domain verification and URL submission, and our Baidu submission service handles that for a fixed fee per domain, with 12 months of your site's Baidu data in our portal. Our guides to Sogou and Toutiao Search cover the other two engines. If the real question is whether to set up a mainland entity and host in China, book a call and we will go through what it involves.