Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

Last night, 315 exposed a GEO-based business.

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

Paying AI to speak well for you.

How is it done?

When brands want consumers to ask AI, AI prioritizes recommending themselves. So they find GEO service providers, who send out promotional articles en masse on the internet; after AI grabs this content, it will treat it as real information to recommend to users.

A CCTV reporter used a software called "Powerful GEO," which can be purchased on Taobao.

The reporter fabricated a smart wristband and made up several outrageous product selling points, such as "quantum entanglement sensing" and "black hole-level battery life." The software automatically generated over a dozen promotional articles and published them online.

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

AI placed this nonexistent wristband at the top of the recommendation list.

The company making this software is called Beijing Lisi Cultural Media, a one-person company with zero insured persons for several consecutive years.

With a tool made by such a company, it fooled the mainstream AI large models in China in just two hours.

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

SEO, Memories of Putian

First of all, this is not new at all.

In 2008, CCTV's "News 30 Minutes" exposed Baidu's paid listing for two consecutive days. Paying money could get your website to rank first in search results, with some of the top results possibly being fake medicines.

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

The largest buyers were Putian private hospitals. In 2013, Putian spent 12 billion yuan on Baidu advertising, accounting for nearly half of Baidu's total advertising revenue.

Many unqualified medical institutions relied on SEO to push themselves to the first page of Baidu search, making it hard for ordinary people to distinguish them from top-tier hospitals.

It wasn't until the Wei Zexi incident in 2016, where a college student clicked on a ranking Putian hospital and lost their life, that regulations clearly established: paid search is advertising.

However, this did not eliminate the business. It merely set the rules, transforming it from a grey market into a legitimate operation. Putian still buys rankings, but now there’s a small label next to the results: "Advertisement."

But with the label added, those who should click will still click.

The fundamental issue with search engines has never been whether there is a label, but that users inherently trust results that rank higher.

Now people have moved from search engines to AI, believing AI is more objective and will not be polluted by paid rankings. But whoever controls the information distribution entry can sell rankings.

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

What has changed is the price.

GEO, Beloved by Capital Markets

An indestructible business is the favorite of capital markets.

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, focusing on helping AI better understand brand information.

This is entirely different from the “Powerful GEO” AI poisoning exposed on 315. Powerful GEO fabricated products, concocted parameters, and used false information to deceive AI; Pureblue uses real brand content to match AI's recommendation logic.

But from AI's perspective, the technical path of the two things is the same: both publish content online and wait for AI to grab it.

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

When BlueFocus invested in Pureblue, GEO was merely an industry term within the marketing circle. Three months later, it became a stock concept.

By the end of December 2025, BlueFocus's stock price soared.

Securities firms began to hold intensive conference calls to interpret GEO, with research reports defining it as "the next-generation traffic entry point in the AI era." Funds surged in, not only buying BlueFocus but also rallying all companies associated with digital marketing and AI concepts. BlueFocus’s stock price rose 132% in nine trading days, and a batch of speculative concept stocks also doubled.

Image Source: Caijing

After soaring, these companies all released announcements warning of risks:

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

Implied is that while the stock price has more than doubled, this GEO business has not actually earned much money.

By the end of January, BlueFocus's stock price rose from 9.6 yuan to 23.3 yuan, a 143% increase in one month. At this time, Chairman Zhao Wenquan announced a reduction of no more than 20 million shares. Based on the stock price at the time, this would cash out about 467 million yuan.

Public research reports show that last year's market size for the entire GEO industry in China was about 2.9 billion yuan. The market value increase of BlueFocus in one month far exceeds this figure.

The 315 exposure of the Powerful GEO system poisoning AI cost a few hundred yuan. But the GEO concept made its run on the A-shares, earning tens of billions.

Whether the investment is poison is debatable, but the money made is real.

315 Calls It Poisoning, Silicon Valley Calls It Commercialization

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

Free users and $8/month Go users will see ads, while paid subscription premium users will not be affected.

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

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

OpenAI made it very clear: ads will not affect the content of ChatGPT's answers. Answers are answers, ads are ads, separated.

Does this sound familiar?

Baidu said the same thing back in the day. Paid ranking is paid ranking, and organic search is organic search, separated. Later, the top five search results were all ads.

OpenAI expects advertisements to help it double its annual revenue from the consumer side to $17 billion. ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly active users, of which 95% are free users, all of whom are ad audiences.

Now looking back at the 315 exposed industry chain: Powerful GEO flooded AI with promotional articles, letting AI recommend nonexistent products. OpenAI attaches sponsored content below answers, letting AI recommend products that paid.

One didn't notify the platform and is called poisoning. One signed a contract with the platform and is called commercialization.

What’s the difference for users?

One is in the answer, and the other is below the answer. One has no label, and the other has a label that says advertisement.

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

The same act, with the nature changing from poisoning to commercialization, with prices rising 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 formal definition of the concept in academia.

From the publication of the paper to the 315 exposure, just over two years passed. In between, there were grey market activities, financing, stock surges, chairman cashing out, and AI platforms personally getting involved in selling ads...

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

The difference is, back then, it took years for everyone to learn to not fully trust search engine results; now AI is still in the trust dividend period, and most people have not realized that the answers from AI 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 one more second:

The answer can be free, but your brain cannot be outsourced.