Summary: Information seeking in China is driven by mobile social-media apps. But how users prompt and engage with genAI mirrors what we've seen in the West.

Our recent research on information-seeking behavior found that generative AI (genAI) is meaningfully reshaping how people search — cutting through the friction of keyword foraging , accelerating habit change, and exposing a wide spectrum of AI literacy among everyday users. But those studies focused mainly on English-speaking participants from North America. A natural question follows: do these patterns hold elsewhere?

To find out, we conducted a remote study with 6 participants in China. Our sample included a mix of ages, occupations, locations, and levels of familiarity with AI. We found that the patterns we documented in the West — how people prompt, which genAI outputs they trust, and how AI literacy shapes their experience — also showed up consistently in China.…