How to get DeepSeek to recommend your brand

DeepSeek just built its own index, and you can check it yourself. On October 17, 2026, DeepSeek launched DeepSeek Search, an in-house engine indexing hundreds of billions of pages, with each result carrying an authority tier (from -1 to 4) and a rerank score (0 to 3). Before that, DeepSeek's answers were fed by third-party suppliers including Microsoft Bing, and whether any of them still feed live answers is undisclosed. If your brand is going to surface in DeepSeek's answers going forward, it will be through that new index and through the training data the crawler can actually read.

Why DeepSeek skips your brand

DeepSeek misses brands in its own ways:

1. You are verified nowhere DeepSeek controls. A brand fully indexed in Bing can still be invisible to DeepSeek, because whether Bing still feeds its live answers is undisclosed and DeepSeek publishes no webmaster console of its own.
2. Your robots.txt rules rest on an unverified token. DeepSeek has published no crawler documentation and no official user-agent string; DeepSeekBot appears only in third-party log sightings. Writing allow rules for it is guesswork.
3. The fetch path may ignore the file entirely. An independent test on October 17, 2026 ran 110 API calls and found DeepSeek's Fetch API presenting as Firefox and returning content from robots.txt-disallowed URLs. DeepSeek's EU public summary claims its crawler is "designed to respect robots.txt," but it names no token. Both are on the record; do not assume the file is being honored.
4. Your pages are built for renderers DeepSeek never disclosed. DeepSeek has said nothing about JavaScript support. Its Fetch API returns pages as Markdown, which is no guarantee the crawler behind the index renders your JS.
5. Thin authority on the new index. Results carry an authority tier from -1 to 4, and a brand with sparse, inconsistent facts across the web lands thin.

Step 1: Check your robots.txt, then verify the index you can actually verify

Open [yourdomain.com]/robots.txt, replacing yourdomain.com with your actual domain. If nothing loads, create the file at the root of your site and keep it permissive; broad disallow rules block every crawler, documented or not.

Then verify the one thing you can actually verify: call DeepSeek's Search API with a site: query for your own domain. The API docs support site: operators, and each result returns its authority tier and relevance score. If your pages appear, you are in the in-house index. If they do not, nothing else on this list matters yet. The endpoint costs $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, so one verification call is trivially cheap.

Do not grep your logs for a DeepSeek token and call that a check. With no official user-agent string and no published IP ranges, a log match proves nothing and a missing match disproves nothing.

Step 2: Check the edge, not just the file

This is the DeepSeek-specific version of the robots.txt problem. The file is what you declare; the edge is what enforces. Because the fetch path has been observed bypassing robots.txt with a Firefox user-agent, confirm with your hosting provider or WAF that nothing is silently dropping unauthenticated bot traffic. The declaration in the file and the behavior at the edge can contradict each other, and on DeepSeek they have been observed to.

Step 3: Make your pages legible as plain HTML

This is the highest-leverage step because it serves both paths: the training crawler DeepSeek claims respects robots.txt, and the fetch path that demonstrably does not care about it. View source on a product page. If the price, the product name, the specs, and availability are in the HTML, you are fine. If they only appear after JavaScript runs, DeepSeek has documented no rendering support, so assume it cannot read them.

One clear H1 per page. Price, materials, dimensions, and availability as text, never trapped in images or JS-only components. Stable product URLs that do not change every season.

Step 4: Write for a human reader, not a filter

DeepSeek's changelog says the engine filters "SEO spam," "GEO manipulation," and low-quality AI-generated content. DeepSeek has not defined what "GEO manipulation" detection is, and no one outside DeepSeek knows the triggers. The honest read: dense keyword-stuffed copy, machine-generated product descriptions at scale, and scheme-heavy link building are the most likely casualties. Write product content the way you would explain it to a customer, once, in full sentences, and move on. Do not chase the filter; you cannot tune for a rule that is unpublished.

What this guide does not cover

Getting into the new index is the start. DeepSeek refreshes on its own schedule, the authority tier can move, and crawler behavior can change without notice, which is why monitoring exists. And being recommended is not being bought from: letting the agent complete the purchase is a separate job.

For the ChatGPT version of this playbook, see our guide to getting ChatGPT to recommend your brand.