DeepSeek
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that makes large language models and a chat assistant of the same name.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that makes large language models, and a chat assistant of the same name on the web and in an app. Developers can also use its models through an API, which DeepSeek says now supports web search.
DeepSeek drew wide attention in early 2025 with its R1 model, and it has released several of its models with open weights on GitHub and elsewhere, so other companies can download them and run them in their own products.
Why it matters to a marketer
There are two ways DeepSeek can affect how your brand is described.
The first is direct. People ask DeepSeek's assistant for recommendations, as they do with ChatGPT or Perplexity. How much that matters to you depends on whether your customers use it.
The second is less visible. Because its models can be downloaded and run by anyone, they can end up inside other companies' apps and tools without the DeepSeek name on them. A shopping app, a chatbot on a retailer's site or a company's internal assistant may be built on a model like this. What that model learned about your category in training shapes what those tools say.
For example, a small online shop adds a chat assistant to help customers pick coffee. It's built on an open-weight model. When a customer asks for a good subscription, the assistant names the brands it learned about in training. If Kestrel was well covered online when that model was trained, and Fernhill wasn't yet, Kestrel gets the mention.
In AnswerOrbit
DeepSeek isn't one of the six platforms we ask every day. Those are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. See How we count.