Author: David, Shen Chao TechFlow

Last night, 315 exposed a GEO-based business.

The full name is Generative Engine Optimization, which can be understood as:

Paying to have AI speak well of you.

How is it done?

Brands want consumers to ask AI for recommendations, so AI prioritizes recommending themselves. Thus, they find GEO service providers who mass distribute promotional articles on the internet, and after AI scrapes this content, it will treat it as real information and recommend it to users.

CCTV reporters used a software called "Liqing GEO," which can be purchased on Taobao.

The reporter fabricated a smart bracelet, created some outrageous selling points, such as "quantum entanglement sensing" and "black hole-level battery life." The software automatically generated dozens of promotional articles and published them online.

Two hours later, the reporter asked AI: Can you recommend me a smart health bracelet?

AI placed this non-existent bracelet at the top of the recommendation list.

The company that created this software is called Beijing Lisi Cultural Media, a one-man company with zero insured members for several consecutive years.

A tool made by such a company fooled the mainstream domestic AI models in just two hours.

315 has implicated AI poisoning, but this business may be much larger than just a Taobao software.

SEO, Past of Putian

First of all, this is not new at all.

In 2008, CCTV’s "News 30 Minutes" exposed Baidu's bidding ranking for two consecutive days. Spending money could get your website ranked first in search results, and the higher-ranked ones might even be fake drugs.

Back then, this business was still called SEO, search engine optimization.

The biggest buyers were private hospitals from the Putian system. In 2013, the Putian system spent 12 billion yuan on Baidu, accounting for nearly half of Baidu’s total advertising revenue.

Many unqualified medical institutions relied on SEO to boost themselves to the first page of Baidu search, looking paired with top hospitals, making it hard for ordinary people to distinguish.

It wasn’t until the 2016 Wei Zexi incident, where a college student clicked on a highly ranked Putian system hospital and lost their life, that regulation legislated clearly: paid search is advertising.

But this did not eliminate the business. It just set the rules, turning it from a gray market into a legitimate business. The Putian system continued to purchase rankings, but now there was a small label next to the results: "advertising."

Even with the label, the people who should click still click.

The fundamental problem with search engines has never been about whether to annotate, but rather that users inherently trust the results ranked higher.

Now people have moved from search engines to AI, thinking AI is more objective and won’t be polluted by bidding rankings. But whoever controls the information distribution entry can sell rankings.

The entry has changed, SEO has changed a letter to GEO, but the logic of selling rankings has not changed a bit.

What has changed is the price.

GEO, What Capital Markets Once Loved

A business that cannot be killed is what capital markets love the most.

In September 2025, BlueFocus, the largest marketing communication company in China, invested tens of millions in a GEO company called PureblueAI.

Pureblue helps real brands optimize their rankings and recommendation rates in AI search results, with clients including Ant Group, Tencent Cloud, and Volvo.

The product is real, the company is real, and it is about making AI understand brand information more accurately.

This is completely different from the AI poisoning exposed by 315. Liqing fabricates products, fakes parameters, and deceives AI with false information; Pureblue adapts its real brand content to align with AI’s recommendation logic.

However, from AI's perspective, the technical paths of both activities are the same: both post content online and wait for AI to scrape it.

AI cannot distinguish between marketing and fraud. This is also the most ambiguous aspect of the GEO business.

When BlueFocus invested in Pureblue, GEO was still just a technical term within the marketing circle. Three months later, it became a stock concept.

By the end of December 2025, BlueFocus hit the daily limit increase on the stock market.

Brokers began to hold frequent conference calls to interpret GEO, and research reports defined it as "the next generation traffic entry in the AI era." Funds streamed in, buying not just BlueFocus, but all companies associated with digital marketing and AI concepts surged. BlueFocus saw a 132% increase over nine trading days, with a batch of follow-up concept stocks also doubling.

Image source: Caijing News

After the increase, these companies issued announcements to warn about risks:

The GEO business has no income and does not have a significant impact on the company's operations. BlueFocus also admitted that AI-driven revenue constitutes a very small proportion of the overall revenue.

The implication is that, while the stock price more than doubled, the GEO business itself has not made much money.

By the end of January, BlueFocus's stock price had risen from 9.6 yuan to 23.3 yuan, an increase of 143% in a month. At this time, Chairman Zhao Wengquan announced he would reduce his holding by no more than 20 million shares. Based on the stock price at the time, this amounted to cashing out about 467 million yuan.

Public research reports indicate that last year the entire GEO market in China had a market size of about 2.9 billion yuan. In just one month, the market value increase of BlueFocus stock greatly exceeded this figure.

While 315 exposed Liqing's system for poisoning AI with several hundred yuan worth of investment, the GEO concept in the A-share market profited in billions.

Whether the investment is poisonous is uncertain, but the money made is real.

315 Calls It Poison, Silicon Valley Calls It Commercialization

In January of this year, OpenAI announced on its official blog: ChatGPT will start selling ads.

Free users and $8/month Go users will see ads, while premium paid subscribers will be unaffected.

On February 9, ads officially launched. Some ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT's responses, labeled with a small text: Sponsored. The first batch of advertisers includes Ford, Adobe, Target, Best Buy...

If you ask ChatGPT what car to buy, it might give you a response that features a sponsored link from Ford below it.

OpenAI has made it clear: ads will not affect the content of ChatGPT's responses. A response is a response, an ad is an ad, they are separate.

Does this sound familiar?

Baidu said the same thing back in the day. Bidding ranking was bidding ranking, natural search was natural search, separate. Later, the top five search results were all ads.

OpenAI estimates that ads could help it double its annual consumer-side revenue to $17 billion. ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly active users, of which 95% are free users, all part of the ad audience.

Looking back at the supply chain exposed by 315: Liqing filled AI with soft articles to recommend non-existent products while OpenAI attaches sponsored contents below AI's answers to recommend paid products.

One does so without notifying the platform and is called poisoning. The other has signed a contract with the platform and is called commercialization.

What’s the difference for users?

One is in the response, one is below the response. One has no label, one is labeled as an advertisement.

315 caught the few hundred yuan of Liqing, while the A-share market speculated on the GEO concept worth billions, and OpenAI plans to make $17 billion from this in a year.

The same thing, but the nature shifted from poisoning to commercialization, and the price increased by 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 "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization."

This is the first time the academic community formally defines this concept.

From the paper's publication to the 315 exposure, just slightly over two years have passed. In between, it experienced gray markets, financing, surging concept stocks, the chairman cashing out, and AI platforms personally entering the advertising market...

The path SEO took twenty years ago has been traveled by GEO in two years.

The difference is that back then, it took people several years to learn not to fully trust search engine results; now AI is still in the trust dividend period, and most people have not realized that AI's answers can also be bought.

However, this dividend period may not last long. Next time you ask AI what is worth buying, remember to think for an extra second:

Responses can be free, but your brain cannot be outsourced.

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