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

Last night, the 315 Gala exposed a business based on GEO.

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

Paying to have AI speak well of you.

How is it done?

Brands want AI to prioritize recommending them when consumers ask. So they find GEO service providers, who then mass-publish promotional soft articles online. After AI crawls this content, it treats it as genuine 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 several absurd 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 an AI: Can you recommend a smart health wristband?

The AI placed this non-existent wristband at the top of its recommendation list.

The company behind this software is Beijing Lisi Culture Media, a one-person company with zero employees enrolled in social insurance for consecutive years.

A tool made by such a company managed to deceive mainstream domestic AI large language models in just two hours.

The 315 Gala exposed AI poisoning, but this business might be much bigger than just a Taobao software.

SEO, The Putian Story

First, this is nothing new at all.

In 2008, CCTV’s “News 30 Minutes” exposed Baidu’s paid ranking system for two consecutive days. Paying money could get your website to the top of search results, and sometimes even fake medicine ads ranked first.

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

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

Many unqualified medical institutions used SEO to boost themselves to the first page of Baidu search results, appearing alongside top-tier hospitals, making it impossible for ordinary people to tell the difference.

It wasn’t until the 2016 Wei Zexi incident, where a college student died after treatment at a top-ranked Putian hospital, that regulations were established, clearly デフィning paid search as advertising.

But this didn’t kill the business. It just established rules, turning it from a gray-area operation into a legitimate one. Putian hospitals still bought rankings, but now a small label “Ad” appeared next to the results.

But even with the label, people who would click still clicked.

The fundamental problem with search engines was never about labeling, but that users inherently trust the top results.

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

The gateway changed, SEO changed a letter to become GEO, but the logic of selling rankings hasn’t changed a single word.

What changed is the price.

GEO, Loved by the Capital 市場

Businesses that can’t be killed are the favorites of the capital market.

In September 2025, BlueFocus, China’s largest marketing 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 product is real, the company is real, and its goal is to help AI understand brand information more accurately.

This is completely different from the “Liqing” AI poisoning exposed by 315. Liqing fabricates products and parameters, feeding AI false information; Pureblue adapts real brand content to fit AI’s recommendation logic.

But from AI’s perspective, the technical path for both is the same: both involve publishing content online and waiting for AI to crawl it.

AI can’t distinguish between marketing and fabrication. This is the most ambiguous aspect of the GEO business.

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

At the end of December 2025, BlueFocus’s stock hit the daily limit-up.

Brokerages began holding intensive conference calls to interpret GEO, with research reports デフィning it as “the next-generation traffic gateway in the AI era.” Capital flowed in, buying not just BlueFocus but also any company related to digital marketing or AI concepts. BlueFocus rose 132% in 9 trading days, and a batch of related concept stocks also doubled.

Source: Cailian Press

After the surge, these companies issued risk warnings: GEO business generates no revenue and has no significant impact on company operations. BlueFocus also admitted that AI-driven revenue accounts for a very small portion of its overall revenue.

The implication is that while the stock price more than doubled, the GEO business itself hasn’t made much money yet.

At the end of January, BlueFocus’s stock price rose from 9.6 yuan to 23.3 yuan, a 143% increase in one month. Right then, Chairman Zhao Wenquan announced plans to sell up to 20 million shares. Based on the stock price at the time, this amounted to a cash-out of approximately 467 million yuan.

Public research reports show that last year, the total market size of the domestic GEO industry was about 2.9 billion yuan. The market value increase of BlueFocus’s stock alone in one month far exceeded that figure.

The 315 Gala exposed Liqing’s system poisoning AI for a few hundred yuan. But the GEO concept in the A-share market made tens of billions.

Whether it’s poison or not 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-per-month Go users will see ads, while paid premium subscribers are unaffected.

Ads officially launched on February 9th. Some ads appear at the bottom of ChatGPT’s answers, marked with a small label: Sponsored. The first batch of advertisers included Ford, Adobe, Target, Best Buy…

You ask ChatGPT what car to buy, it gives you an answer, and a sponsored Ford link hangs below the answer.

OpenAI stated clearly: Ads will not influence ChatGPT’s answer content. The answer is the answer, the ad is the ad, they are separate.

Does that sound familiar?

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

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

Looking back now at the industry chain exposed by 315: Liqing feeds soft articles into AI, making it recommend non-existent products. OpenAI places sponsored content below AI’s answers, making it recommend products that paid for placement.

One didn’t notify the platform, it’s called poisoning. One signed a contract with the platform, it’s called commercialization.

For users, what’s the difference?

One is inside the answer, one is below the answer. One has no label, one has a label saying “Ad.”

315 caught Liqing for a few hundred yuan, the A-share market hyped the GEO concept for tens of billions, and OpenAI plans to make $17 billion a year from this.

The same thing, its nature changed from poisoning to commercialization, 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 “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. In between, it went through gray-area operations, financing, concept stock surges, chairman cash-outs, AI platforms themselves entering the ad-selling game…

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

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

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

Answers can be free, but your brain shouldn’t be outsourced.

この記事はインターネットから得たものです。 315 Exposes AI Poisoning: A Business Journey from Putian to Silicon Valley

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