When it was revealed last summer that Google had been working on a search engine for the Chinese market called “project dragonfly”, Baidu chief executive Robin Li responded with fighting words.

“In 2010, when Google left China, its market share was falling and Baidu’s market share had already passed 70 per cent,” Mr Li wrote on social media platform WeChat. “If Google comes back now, we can just PK [player kill] again for real.”

The fight for search in China, however, is not shaping up to be a match between Baidu and Google — which announced in July that “project dragonfly” had been “terminated” — but rather a question of keeping ad dollars and users from flowing into the walled ecosystems of Baidu’s Chinese rivals, start-up ByteDance and tech conglomerate Tencent.