Tongyi Qianwen: Alibaba AI Assistant and Web Search
Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问) is the Chinese name that Alibaba gave to its Qwen models and to its AI assistant. Today Alibaba offers the assistant as Qwen Chat and, on its Chinese site, as 千问 (Qianwen). Both can search the web. Alibaba does not document a crawler or user agent for this search, so a site owner cannot allow or block it by name.
Names and products
The Chinese README of Alibaba’s first open Qwen release calls the series “Qwen (通义千问)” (QwenLM/Qwen). The same README links to a 通义千问 app in the App Store. Today the Qwen name covers several products:
| Product | Where | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen models | Hugging Face, GitHub, Alibaba Cloud | The AI models |
| Qwen Chat | chat.qwen.ai and a mobile app | The Qwen assistant |
| 千问 (Qianwen) | qianwen.com | Alibaba’s AI assistant site in Chinese |
| Model Studio | Alibaba Cloud | API access to Qwen models for developers |
The Qwen team links Qwen Chat on the web and in a mobile app in its Qwen3 announcement. On October 22, 2026, the old address tongyi.com sent visitors to qianwen.com.
This page is about the assistant. The Qwen guide covers the models.
Web search in the assistant
The Qwen Chat page lists web search as a feature. The Chinese site qianwen.com describes 千问 as Alibaba’s official AI assistant with AI search and web page summaries. Neither page says which search engine or crawler supplies the results, or how answers show sources.
Web search in the API
Developers turn on search in Alibaba Cloud Model Studio with the enable_search parameter (web search documentation). The documentation gives these facts:
- DashScope is Alibaba’s own API format. With
enable_sourceset totrue, it returns the sources insearch_info.search_results. Each result has an index, a title and a URL. - The Responses API returns source links in
action.sourcesand asurl_citationannotations. - The documentation does not name a search engine, a crawler or a user agent.
Crawlers and blocking
Alibaba does not document a user agent, a robots.txt token or IP ranges for Qwen Chat, 千问 or the Model Studio search. For this reason, this guide cannot give a robots.txt rule for them. If you see unknown bots in your logs, the guide How to Find and Block AI Crawlers shows how to find and block them.