From "Poisoning" to "Commercialization": How Has the GEO Business Grown Ten Thousand Times?

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

Original Title: 315 Exposure AI Poisoning, a Business That Started in Putian and Reached Silicon Valley

Last night, 315 exposed a GEO-based business.

The full name is Generative Engine Optimization, you can think of it as:

Paying to make AI speak favorably about you.

How is it done?

Brands want consumers to ask AI about them, so they find GEO service providers. These providers mass-distribute promotional soft articles on the internet. After AI fetches this content, it treats it as real information and recommends it to users.

CCTV reporters used a software called “LiQing GEO,” which can be purchased on Taobao.

The reporter fabricated a smart wristband, inventing absurd selling points like “Quantum Entanglement Sensing” and “Black Hole-Level Battery Life.” The software automatically generated over a dozen promotional articles and posted them online.

Two hours later, the reporter asked AI: “Please recommend a smart health wristband for me.”

AI ranked this non-existent wristband at the top of the recommendation list.

The company behind this software is Beijing Lisi Cultural Media, a one-person operation with zero insured employees for consecutive years.

A tool created by such a company managed to fool major domestic AI models in just two hours.

While 315 exposed AI poisoning, this business might be much larger than a Taobao software.

SEO, the Past of Putian

First, this is nothing new.

In 2008, CCTV’s “News 30 Minutes” exposed Baidu’s paid ranking for two consecutive days. Paying could get your website to rank first in search results, and sometimes the top results were even fake medicines.

At that time, this business was called SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

The biggest buyers were private hospitals affiliated with Putian. In 2013, Putian hospitals spent nearly 12 billion yuan on Baidu ads that year, nearly half of Baidu’s total ad revenue.

Many unqualified medical institutions used SEO to push themselves to the first page of Baidu search, making them look like top-tier hospitals, indistinguishable to ordinary people.

It wasn’t until the 2016 Wei Zexi incident, when a college student died after visiting a Putian hospital ranked highly, that regulators legislated: paid search is advertising.

But this didn’t eliminate the business. It only formalized the rules, turning gray-area practices into legitimate business. Putian hospitals still buy rankings, but now there’s a small label: “Advertisement.”

But once labeled, people still click.

The fundamental problem with search engines has never been whether there’s a label, but that users naturally trust the top-ranked results.

Now, people have shifted from search engines to AI, believing AI is more objective and less polluted by paid rankings. But whoever controls the information distribution can sell rankings.

The entry point has changed, and SEO has been renamed GEO, but the logic of selling rankings remains the same.

What has changed is the price.

GEO, Capital Market’s Favorite

Unstoppable business, most loved by capital markets.

In September 2025, China’s largest marketing firm BlueFocus invested millions in a GEO company called PureblueAI.

Pureblue helps real brands optimize their ranking and recommendation rates in AI search results, serving clients like Ant Group, Tencent Cloud, and Volvo.

The product is real, the company is real, and they aim to make AI better understand brand information.

This is completely different from the AI poisoning exposed by 315. LiQing is about fabricating products, creating false parameters, and deceiving AI with fake info; Pureblue uses real brand content to align with AI’s recommendation logic.

But from AI’s perspective, both paths are the same: publishing content online for AI to fetch.

AI can’t distinguish marketing from deception. This is the most ambiguous part of GEO business.

When BlueFocus invested in Pureblue, GEO was just an industry term in marketing circles. Three months later, it became a stock concept.

By the end of December 2025, BlueFocus hit the daily limit up.

Brokerages began holding conference calls to interpret GEO, calling it “the next-generation traffic entry point in the AI era.” Capital flooded in, not only buying BlueFocus but also all companies related to digital marketing and AI concepts. BlueFocus’s stock rose 132% in nine trading days, and many concept stocks doubled.

Image source: Cailian Press

After the surge, these companies issued risk warnings:

GEO business has no revenue and does not significantly impact company operations. BlueFocus also admitted that AI-driven revenue accounts for a very small portion of total revenue.

In other words, the stock price doubled, but the GEO business itself hasn’t made much money.

At the end of January, BlueFocus’s stock price rose from 9.6 yuan to 23.3 yuan, a 143% increase in a month. At this point, Chairman Zhao Wenquan announced he would reduce holdings by no more than 20 million shares. Based on the current price, this would cash out about 467 million yuan.

Public research reports show that last year, the domestic GEO industry market size was about 2.9 billion yuan. The market cap increase of BlueFocus in one month far exceeded this figure.

315 exposed LiQing’s system poisoning AI with a few hundred yuan. But the GEO concept in A-shares made billions.

Whether it was poisoning or not, the money was real.

315 Calls It Poisoning, Silicon Valley Calls It Commercialization

In January this year, OpenAI announced on its official blog that ChatGPT would start selling ads.

Free users and the $8/month ChatGPT Plus users will see ads, while paid subscribers are unaffected.

On February 9, ads officially launched. Some appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses, marked with a small “Sponsored” label. Initial advertisers include Ford, Adobe, Target, Best Buy…

When you ask ChatGPT what car to buy, it gives an answer with a sponsored link from Ford below.

OpenAI clearly states: ads won’t influence ChatGPT’s responses. Responses are responses; ads are ads, separate.

Does that sound familiar?

Back in the day, Baidu also said the same. Paid rankings are paid rankings; organic search is organic. They were separated. Later, the top five search results were all ads.

OpenAI expects ads to double its consumer revenue to $17 billion annually. With over 800 million weekly active users, 95% are free users, all potential ad audiences.

Looking back at the 315 exposure: LiQing injecting soft articles into AI to recommend nonexistent products. OpenAI placing sponsored content below responses, making AI recommend paid products.

One is poisoning without platform consent; the other is commercialized with a contract. What’s the difference for users?

One appears inside the answer; the other below the answer. One has no label; the other is marked as an ad.

The 315 case involved a few hundred yuan for LiQing, while the GEO concept in A-shares made billions. OpenAI aims to earn 17 billion dollars a year from this.

The nature of the same activity shifted from poisoning to commercialization, with the price increasing by tens of thousands of times.

In November 2023, researchers from IIT Delhi and Princeton published a paper titled “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” on arXiv.

This was the first formal academic definition of the concept.

From the paper’s publication to the 315 exposure, just over two years. During this time, gray-market practices, financing, concept stock surges, chairman cash-outs, and AI platforms directly selling ads all unfolded.

Twenty years ago, SEO took years to learn not to fully trust search engine results; now, AI is still in its trust dividend period, and most people haven’t realized AI responses can also be bought.

But this dividend may 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 can’t be outsourced.