315 Exposes AI Poisoning: A Business That Goes from Putian to Silicon Valley

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

Last night, the 315 Consumer Rights Day exposed a GEO-based business.

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

Pay money to make AI speak well of you.

How does it work?

Brands want consumers to ask AI about them, so AI will prioritize recommending their products. They find GEO service providers, who then mass-distribute promotional soft articles online. After AI fetches this content, it treats it as real information and recommends it to users.

A CCTV reporter 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.”

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 years of social insurance contributions.

Such a tool, created by a single company, fooled major domestic AI models in just two hours.

The 315 exposure revealed AI poisoning, but this business might be much bigger than a Taobao software.

SEO, the Past of Putian

First of all, this isn’t new at all.

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

Back then, this business was called SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

The biggest buyers were Putian private hospitals. 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’s treatment at a top-ranked Putian hospital resulted in death, that regulators legislated: paid search is advertising.

But this didn’t eliminate the business. It only formalized the rules, turning it from an underground activity into a legitimate business. Putian hospitals still buy rankings, but now with a small label: “Ad.”

However, 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 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 portal can sell rankings.

The entrance changed, and SEO became GEO—a different letter, but the logic remains the same.

What changed is the price.

GEO, a darling of the capital markets

An indestructible business, most loved by capital markets.

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

Pureblue helps real brands optimize their ranking 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 they’re making AI better understand brand information.

This is completely different from the AI poisoning exposed by 315. LiQing poisons AI with fabricated products and parameters; Pureblue uses real brand content to fit AI’s recommendation logic.

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

AI can’t distinguish marketing from deception. That’s the most ambiguous part of GEO.

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 portal in the AI era.” Capital flooded in, not just 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 part of total revenue.

In other words, the stock price doubled, but the GEO business itself isn’t making 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 Wenguan 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’s total market size was about 2.9 billion yuan. The market cap increase of BlueFocus in just one month far exceeded this figure.

The 315 exposure of LiQing poisoning AI cost only a few hundred yuan. But the GEO concept in A-shares ran a whole cycle, earning billions.

Whether it’s poisoning or not is hard to say, but the money made is real.

315 called 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, but premium subscribers are unaffected.

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

If you ask ChatGPT what car to buy, it will give you an answer with a sponsored link from Ford below.

OpenAI clearly states: ads won’t influence ChatGPT’s answers. Answers are answers; 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. But later, the top five search results were all ads.

OpenAI expects ads to double its consumer-side annual revenue to $17 billion. ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly active users, 95% of whom are free users, all of whom are ad audiences.

Looking back now at the 315 exposure: LiQing injecting soft articles into AI, making AI recommend non-existent products. OpenAI placing sponsored content under AI responses, making AI recommend paid products.

One is poisoning without platform notice; the other is signed business, called commercialization.

What’s the difference for users?

One appears inside the answer; the other below the answer. One has no label; the other is labeled “Ad.”

LiQing, which made a few hundred yuan, caused the A-share GEO concept to surge by billions. OpenAI plans to make $17 billion a year from this.

The same activity, from poisoning to commercialization, increased in price by tens of thousands of times.

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

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, it went through underground activity, financing, concept stock surges, chairman cash-outs, and AI platforms directly selling ads…

The path SEO took twenty years ago, GEO completed in two years.

The difference is that back then, it took years for people to learn not to fully trust search engine results; now, AI is still in its trust dividend period, and most people haven’t realized that AI’s answers 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.