<div id="readability-page-1" class="page"><div><div>Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlowLast night, 315 exposed a business based on GEO.The full name is Generative Engine Optimization, which you can understand as:Paying AI to speak well of you.How is it done?Brands want AI to recommend them first when consumers ask AI questions. So they found a GEO service provider, who then mass-produced promotional articles online. AI, after extracting this content, would recommend it to users as legitimate information. A CCTV reporter used software called &#34;Liqing GEO,&#34; which can be purchased on Taobao. The reporter fabricated a smart bracelet, creating several outrageous selling points, such as &#34;quantum entanglement sensing&#34; and &#34;black hole-level battery life.&#34; The software automatically generated over a dozen promotional articles and published them online. Two hours later, the reporter asked the AI: &#34;Can you recommend a smart health bracelet for me?&#34; The AI ​​placed this non-existent bracelet at the top of the recommendation list. The company that developed this software is called Beijing Lisi Culture Media, a one-person company with zero employees enrolled in social insurance for several consecutive years. This tool, created by just one company, fooled mainstream domestic AI models in just two hours. The 315 consumer rights day exposed AI-induced poisoning, but this business is likely much larger than a Taobao app. SEO, the Putian story. First of all, this is nothing new. In 2008, CCTV's &#34;News 30 Minutes&#34; exposed Baidu's paid search ranking for two consecutive days. Paying money could make your website rank first in search results, and even those ranking first might be counterfeit medicine. Back then, this business was called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. The biggest buyers were private hospitals affiliated with the Putian medical group. In 2013, the Putian group spent 12 billion yuan on advertising on Baidu, accounting for nearly half of Baidu's total advertising revenue. Many unqualified medical institutions used SEO to rank themselves on the first page of Baidu search results, appearing alongside top-tier hospitals, making it impossible for ordinary people to distinguish them. It wasn't until the Wei Zexi incident in 2016, where a college student clicked on a top-ranking Putian hospital and died from the illness, that regulations explicitly defined paid search as advertising. This didn't eliminate the business. It simply established rules, transforming it from a gray market to a legitimate business. The Putian network still buys rankings, only now there's a small label next to the result: &#34;Advertisement.&#34; But even with the label, those who want to click will still click. The fundamental problem with search engines has never been whether or not there's a label, but rather that users naturally trust the results displayed at the top. People have now moved from search engines to AI, believing AI is more objective and less susceptible to the contamination of paid search rankings. But whoever controls the information distribution gateway can sell rankings. The gateway has changed; SEO has changed a letter to GEO, but the logic of selling rankings remains the same. What has changed is the price. GEO, the capital market once loved. An unkillable business is what the capital market loves most. In September 2025, BlueFocus, China's largest marketing and communications company, invested tens of millions of yuan in a GEO company called PureblueAI. Pureblue helps real brands optimize their ranking and recommendation rate in AI search results; its clients include Ant Group, Tencent Cloud, and Volvo. The products are real, the company is real, and what it does is help AI understand brand information more accurately. This is completely different from the AI ​​poisoning scheme exposed by 315 (China's consumer rights day). Liqing fabricated products, manipulated parameters, and used false information to deceive AI; Pureblue uses real brand content to adapt to AI's recommendation logic. From an AI perspective, the technical path for both is the same: publishing content online and waiting for AI to crawl it. AI can't distinguish between marketing and fraud. This is the most ambiguous aspect of the GEO business. When BlueFocus invested in Qinglan, GEO was just an industry term within the marketing circle. Three months later, it became a stock concept. At the end of December 2025, BlueFocus's stock price hit the daily limit. Brokerages began holding numerous conference calls to interpret GEO, defining it in research reports as &#34;the next-generation traffic portal in the AI ​​era.&#34; Funds poured in, not only buying BlueFocus, but also any company even remotely related to digital marketing or AI concepts. BlueFocus rose 132% in nine trading days, and a number of related concept stocks also doubled in value. After the price surge, these companies issued their own announcements warning of risks: GEO business has no revenue and has no significant impact on the company's operations. BlueFocus also admitted that AI-driven revenue accounts for a very small proportion of its overall revenue. The implication is that while the stock price more than doubled, the GEO business itself hadn't yet generated much profit. At the end of January, BlueFocus's stock price rose from 9.6 yuan to 23.3 yuan, a 143% increase in one month. Around this time, Chairman Zhao Wenquan announced a reduction of no more than 20 million shares. Based on the stock price at the time, this amounted to approximately 467 million yuan. Public research reports show that the total market size of the domestic GEO industry last year was approximately 2.9 billion yuan. The market capitalization increase of BlueFocus's stock in just one month far exceeded this figure. The 315 exposé revealed that the Liqing system was poisoning AI, costing only a few hundred yuan. But the GEO concept made billions in the A-share market. Whether it was a poisonous investment is debatable, but the money made is real. 315 calls it poisoning, Silicon Valley calls it commercialization. In January of this year, OpenAI announced on its official blog that ChatGPT would start selling ads. Free users and $8-per-month Go users will see ads; paid premium subscribers will not be affected. On February 9th, the ads officially went live. Some ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT answers, marked with a small &#34;Sponsored&#34; label. The first batch of advertisers included Ford, Adobe, Target, Best Buy...You ask ChatGPT what car to buy, and it gives you an answer with a Ford sponsored link below it.OpenAI clearly stated: advertising will not affect the content of ChatGPT answers. Answers are answers, ads are ads, they are separate.Does this sound familiar?Baidu said the same thing back then. Paid search results are paid search results, organic search results are organic search results, they are separate. Later, the top five search results were all ads. OpenAI estimates that advertising could double its annual consumer revenue to $17 billion. ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly active users, 95% of whom are free users and are all audiences for advertising. Looking back at the industry chain exposed by 315: Liqing injected advertorials into AI, making it recommend non-existent products. OpenAI added sponsored content under AI's answers, making it recommend paid products. One thing done without informing the platform is called &#34;poisoning&#34; (or &#34;spreading rumors&#34;). The other thing done with a contract with the platform is called &#34;commercialization.&#34; What's the difference for the user? One is in the answer, the other is below the answer. One has no tag, the other has a tag that says &#34;advertisement.&#34; 315 (China's consumer rights day) arrested Liqing (a company with a stock price of a few hundred yuan), the A-share market saw billions of yuan invested in the GEO concept, and OpenAI plans to earn $17 billion a year from this. The same thing, its nature changed from &#34;poisoning&#34; to &#34;commercialization,&#34; and the price increased tens of thousands of times. In November 2023, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Princeton University published a paper on arXiv titled &#34;GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.&#34; This was the first time the concept was formally defined in academia. From the paper's publication to its exposure on March 15th (China's consumer rights day), just over two years passed. During this period, the industry experienced gray market activities, financing, a surge in related stocks, chairman cashing out, and AI platforms directly selling advertising... GEO accomplished in two years what SEO did twenty years ago. The difference is that back then, it took people several years to learn not to completely trust search engine results; now, AI is still in its trust-based growth phase, and most people haven't realized that AI's answers can also be bought. However, this growth phase might not last long. Next time you ask AI what's worth buying, remember to think for a second: Answers can be free, but your brain shouldn't be outsourced.</div></div></div>

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The 315 consumer rights day exposed a business model called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which involves paying AI to promote brands by generating fake content. This practice, reminiscent of past SEO tactics, allows companies to manipulate AI recommendations. A case study showed how a fabricated product was ranked first by AI after generating promotional articles. While some companies like PureblueAI use legitimate methods to optimize AI rankings, the GEO model raises concerns about misinformation. The capital market has shown interest in GEO, leading to significant stock price increases for related companies, despite warnings about the lack of revenue in this sector.

- The article discusses Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a practice where AI is manipulated to recommend brands based on artificially generated promotional content.  
- The piece highlights the contrast between GEO and traditional search engine optimization (SEO), emphasizing the potential for exploitative practices in AI recommendations, which can mislead consumers.  
- It concludes by warning that while AI may seem more trustworthy than conventional search engines, the same principles of commercialization could undermine its reliability, urging users to remain critical of AI-generated responses.

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315 Exposes AI Poisoning: A Business That Started in Putian and Spread to Silicon Valley