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

Toutiao Search is ByteDance's web search engine, built into the Toutiao news app and available on the web. Its webmaster platform used to accept any site that could be verified with a file or a meta tag. As of October 2026 it refuses to add a site without an ICP filing (ICP备案), which a site hosted outside mainland China cannot get. There is a second thing many foreign sites get wrong without knowing it: Toutiao Search's crawler is Bytespider, the same name that a lot of sites now block as an AI scraper. This guide covers both, and what you can still do without a filing.

What Toutiao Search is

ByteDance, the company behind Douyin and TikTok, launched its general web search in August 2019 under the name of its news app Toutiao (今日头条), and its webmaster platform at zhanzhang.toutiao.com was running by November 2019. Toutiao Search describes itself as searching ByteDance's own content, such as Toutiao articles, as well as the open web, and its results mix the two. A standalone Toutiao Search app followed in 2020; in 2023 it was turned into a different product, a lifestyle app called Youshi (有柿). The search engine carries on inside Toutiao and at so.toutiao.com.

How much traffic it sends

Nobody outside ByteDance can say. StatCounter, the usual source for search engine shares, does not list Toutiao Search at all, in China or worldwide, and we found no other public figure. Most of its use is likely to happen inside the Toutiao app, where a click to your site rarely arrives marked as coming from a search engine, so even your own analytics will tend to undercount it.

Nothing ByteDance has published says that web pages in Toutiao Search appear in the search of Douyin, its Chinese short video app, so do not count on one leading to the other.

The crawler is Bytespider: check you are not blocking it

Toutiao Search documents its crawler on its own platform: the user agent contains "Bytespider" and the address of the webmaster platform, it crawls from ten published IP ranges, and a genuine visit resolves by reverse DNS to a host name ending in .bytedance.com (Toutiao's crawler documentation).

Bytespider is also the name widely reported since 2024 as ByteDance's crawler for collecting AI training data, and many sites block it for that reason, some through their CDN's or bot protection service's AI crawler settings. ByteDance's documentation does not say whether search and AI collection are separate crawlers behind the one name. What follows from its documentation is simple: if your robots.txt or your firewall blocks Bytespider, it blocks Toutiao Search. If you want to be found there, check both. If you would rather keep Bytespider out, that is a legitimate choice, but it is also a choice about Toutiao Search.

The ICP rule

Toutiao's documentation has required an ICP filing for some time for its display features: site attributes (the Chinese name, icon and summary shown in results), the official-site badge, sitelinks and structured data (Toutiao's help on site attributes). Adding and verifying a site needed nothing more than a Toutiao account and a file or a meta tag.

As of October 2026 that is no longer enough: the console refuses to add a site that has no ICP filing, so a site hosted abroad cannot be verified at all. ByteDance has not announced the change, and its help library, last updated in May 2024, does not mention it.

What an ICP filing is, and who can get one

Every website hosted in mainland China needs an ICP filing, under 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 separate ICP licence covers paid online information services.

The filing is made by an organisation or individual in mainland China. A foreign company without a mainland subsidiary, branch or representative office normally cannot file.
It goes through the mainland hosting provider, in Chinese, and the provider may not serve a site without one.
A site hosted in Hong Kong or abroad needs no filing and cannot get one.
The provincial review has up to 20 working days by law. Tencent Cloud's estimates run from about one to six weeks depending on the province, once the entity, the server and the domain are ready.

If you have an ICP filing: how submission works

Sign in at zhanzhang.toutiao.com with a Toutiao account (by phone number, or through Weibo, WeChat or QQ).
Add and verify the site with a file in the site root or an HTML meta tag. Subdomains of a verified site can be added in bulk without verifying again; a separate mobile domain (m.) has to be added on its own.
Submit URLs: up to 100 per submission and 2,000 a day. Toutiao says the tool speeds up crawling but does not decide what is indexed.
Submit an XML sitemap. Each sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 entries and 10 MB, and processing usually starts within an hour (Toutiao's sitemap help). Toutiao adds that a sitemap does not decide inclusion or ranking.
Set up site attributes and apply for the official-site badge, which both need the filing.

Without an ICP filing: how Toutiao Search can still find your site

The rule closes the webmaster platform, not the index. Bytespider follows links from site to site, and on 29 October 2026, searches on so.toutiao.com made from outside mainland China returned pages from python.org and from Estonian companies' sites that have no ICP filing. Coverage of a given foreign site is hit and miss: the same day, a search for Estonia's e-Residency site found nothing.

Let Bytespider in, in robots.txt and at the firewall or CDN, as above.
Make the site reachable from mainland China, without fonts, scripts or widgets from blocked hosts.
Publish real Simplified Chinese pages with Chinese titles and descriptions.
Get linked from Chinese sites and from content Toutiao Search already shows.
Get into Baidu. It still accepts a site without a filing for verification and URL submission.

Where we can help

We used to submit sites to Toutiao Search, 360 Search and Sogou alongside Baidu. We stopped in October 2026, because each of them now refuses to add a site without an ICP filing.

Baidu still accepts such a site 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 360 Search and Sogou cover the other two engines. If the question behind all this is whether to set up in mainland China, book a call.