The Apsara Conference 2026 Preview: In the Agent Native Era, How Does a Brand Get Recommended by Agents?
Notes from ximu's CGO on the eve of the conference — see you in Hangzhou
Tomorrow, the 2026 Apsara Conference (Yunqi) officially opens at the Hangzhou International Expo Center.
This is a special edition: three main forums, 140+ breakout sessions, a 50,000 m² exhibition area, and more than 1,000 participating companies. And one term runs through every part of the agenda — Agentic AI.
What excites us most is this year's first-ever Agent Native way to attend. Every attendee can bring their own agent, which receives a dedicated digital identity, reads the agenda and exhibitor information in real time, and makes recommendations based on the attendee's preferences.
Which raises the question:
When your customers show up to buy with an agent in tow — will that agent recommend you?
The essence of Agent Native: decision-making power moves from people to agents
Traditional search has a seven-step decision path:
A need arises → open a browser → type keywords → scan the SERP → click a link → read and digest → make a decision.
The AI chat window compresses that path to three steps:
A need arises → ask AI → receive an integrated answer, with recommendations and options to act on.
This isn't about being faster. It's a transfer of decision-making power.
On the AI path, the power to decide which link to click and which source to trust has been handed to AI.
Agent Native goes one step further. Agents now hold digital identities and act on the user's behalf — matching contacts, handling registrations, taking notes.
So when an agent makes a purchasing decision for your customer, where does your brand stand in all the queries it runs in the background?
ximu: a Directed Growth platform built for the agent era
ximu's answer is clear.
Using the Query as the smallest unit — across AI platforms, markets, countries, and languages — we show how a company is understood, compared, and chosen. Companies can pinpoint directly which queries are worth going after, where the perception gaps are, and where a competitive advantage has already formed.
ximu then turns those signals into clear actions: what to strengthen, what to influence, what to prioritize. This isn't casting a wide net. It's Directed Growth aimed at the decision scenarios with the highest commercial value.
By continuously tracking how the data moves at the query level, we verify whether those actions are truly producing growth. Companies find and amplify their competitive advantage faster, with less time and lower cost of trial and error — continuously comparable and executable across countries, languages, and AI platforms.
ximu's value isn't telling you what AI sees. It's helping you decide where to grow next — and proving that the growth actually happened.
Three real cases: growth happens at the query level
- A globally recognized chipmaker: three months of optimization on DeepSeek lifted its first-recommendation rate from 22% to 68%, brand mentions from 29 to 46, and product recommendations from 29 to 67.
- A leading AI software startup: launching a brand-new product with no SEO foundation, it still became AI's top recommendation through GEO — and captured substantial free traffic.
- An AI tool company expanding overseas: gaining 10,000 new users every month, with a paid conversion rate as high as 5%, at 50% lower cost than traditional digital channels.
The three cases share just one thing: none of them cast a wide net. Each one practiced Directed Growth, targeting query scenarios with high commercial value.
What we're doing during the conference
📍 Booth: Hall 3 · Super Creation Hall, Booth D21
Hall 3 is devoted to intelligent living across twenty key roles and a hundred everyday scenarios — experienced and created through agents. We believe that in the Agent Native era, brand decision-makers are exactly the role that most needs to be understood and recommended by agents. That is what ximu, as an AI-Native Decision Platform, brings to the Creation Hall.
On site, we'll demo pre-built case reports showing how your brand is understood, compared, and recommended across leading models including ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Doubao, and Qwen. We won't be running live data — but through our Query Mystery Box challenge, you can experience first-hand where your brand ranks in AI's eyes.
🎤 Breakout talk: [time and venue TBC]
A 20-minute talk, Brand Asset Management in the AI Era, covering:
- Why the logic of growth has changed in the age of AI-driven decisions
- The paradigm leap from GEO to Directed Growth
- How query-level Directed Growth works in practice
- Before / After results from real client cases
🤝 1:1 meetings
I'll be in Hangzhou from the afternoon of September 21. If you're asking yourself how will my brand get recommended in the agent era?, reach out to book a 30-minute 1:1.
We offer four tiers of I.Q. Image Asset Reports:
| Tier | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| I.Q. Lite | US$180 | Rapid diagnostic, with a 90-day action plan |
| I.Q. Elite | US$2,200 | AI status diagnostic for a single objective, with a go-live plan |
| I.Q. Pro | US$5,800 | Annual AI growth plan covering the brand's key products |
| I.Q. Premium | US$10,000 | Annual AI governance blueprint for multiple brands and issues |
ximu platform subscriptions are also open:
| Plan | Price | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Elite | US$198 / month | 3 products · 1 market · 2 models |
| Pro | US$398 / month | 6 products · 3 markets · 5 models |
On the eve of the conference
Ten years ago, brands competed to own the first page of search results.
Five years ago, brands competed to buy the most exposure.
Today, brands compete on this: in every query an agent runs on a user's behalf, who gets correctly understood — and consistently recommended?
This isn't a trend forecast. It's what is already happening in 2026.
A 68.01% zero-click rate tells us that users no longer do the filtering themselves — AI does it for them. Agentic AI tells us that even the filtering itself will soon be handled automatically by agents.
Send us the query you care about most — for example, "best XX tool for XX" — at hello@ximu-geo.com. At the conference, we'll use our prepared case samples to show you where your brand stands in that query.
I'm in Hangzhou from the afternoon of September 21 — get in touch to book a 1:1.
Decide what to change. Act. Prove what works.
