Why we do / don’t

Why doesn’t SearchChamp track DeepSeek?

SearchChamp does not track DeepSeek because we have no faithful way to measure it. There is no grounded citation API, no consumer-plane scraper we trust, and its main audience sits outside our detection baseline. Adding DeepSeek today would mean publishing a number we cannot stand behind, so we deferred it instead.

Three specific things are missing, and each one alone would be enough to hold the engine back.

First, the API surface is not grounded the way our other measured engines are: it does not return the citation set a user actually sees, so an API sample would not describe the consumer experience.

Second, we have no consumer-plane collection path we consider faithful. Our ChatGPT and Gemini measurements come from the consumer plane precisely because API and UI answers diverge; a DeepSeek measurement built on the API alone would carry the divergence we built the rest of the system to avoid.

Third, our language and locale detection baseline is tuned for the markets our customers sell into. A large share of DeepSeek usage sits outside it, so our own confidence scoring would be weakest exactly where the number mattered.

There is also a data-boundary reason, covered separately: we do not send customer site content to China-hosted APIs.

This is a deferral with named revisit triggers, not a permanent verdict. A grounded citation surface, or a consumer-plane path we can verify, would each move it back onto the roadmap. Until then we would rather answer this question than quietly ship measurement theatre.

What this answer is based on

AI engine registry — the measured engine set
Deferral decision, with revisit triggers