Climate change affects the species composition and ecological functions of communities, and species distribution modelling is an important tool to explore the geographical distribution pattern of species. As a degraded indicator species in the temperate grasslands of China, there is a lack of in-depth and systematic understanding of how the geographic distribution pattern of Artemisia frigida responds to climate change. In this study, we selected 355 geographical distribution records and 13 environmental impact factors, and 11 species distribution models from the 'Biomod2’ package in R. We selected Maximum Entropy Model (MaxEnt), Random Forest (RF), Generalized Additive Model (GAM) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBOOST) to construct an ensemble model to predict the potential habitat of A. frigida under the future climate scenes (ssp126, ssp245, ssp585) and two time sequences (2041-2060 and 2061-2080). The results showed that annual precipitation, precipitation in the wettest season, mean temperature in the coldest season, mean annual temperature, altitude and soil bulk density are the dominant environmental factors affecting the distribution of A. frigida. In the current scene (1970-2000), A. frigida mainly distributed in the northern grasslands of China, including Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai Province, Gansu Province, Heilongjiang Province, Sichuan Province, Shanxi Province and Jilin Province. The distribution of A. frigida in the three future climate scenes shows expansion, and the shrinking area mainly occurs in the central region below the 400 mm precipitation line. Under the high-carbon climate scenarios (ssp245 and ssp585), the tendency for A. frigida to expand towards the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and Northeast China is more obvious, with the expansion in the ssp245 scenario by 14.86% and 17.07% in the years 2041-2060 and 2061-2080, respectively; and in the ssp585 scenario by 17.09% and 24.81% in the years 2041-2060 and 2061-2080. The centroid of A. frigida's distribution is projected to generally shift towards the southwest under future climate scenarios. The high-carbon climate scenario (ssp585) accelerates the migration rate of A. frigida, which affects the species composition of the native communities and may influence the species composition and ecological pattern of grassland ecosystems in China. The grassland of A. frigida is susceptible to desertification, and the scientific management of A. frigida is important for desertification control and ecological restoration in the northeast of China, where the trend of warming and drying is more obvious in the future. The results of this study will provide a reference for understanding the distribution pattern of A. frigida in the context of future climate change and rational management of northern grasslands in China.