315 Exposure: AI Data Poisoning, a Business That Runs from Putian to Silicon Valley

From Putian to Silicon Valley, SEO changed a letter.

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

Last night, on March 15th, a GEO-based business was exposed.

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

Pay money to let AI speak well of 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.

A CCTV reporter used a software called “LiQing GEO,” which can be bought on Taobao.

The reporter fictionalized 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 Culture Media, a one-person operation with zero insurance coverage for years.

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

The March 15th incident revealed AI poisoning, but this business might be much bigger than a Taobao software.

SEO, the Past of Putian

First of all, 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 some top results were even fake medicines.

At that time, 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 in a 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 who clicked on a top-ranked Putian hospital died, that regulations clarified: paid search is advertising.

But this didn’t eliminate the business. It only formalized the rules, turning it from gray industry into legitimate business. Putian hospitals still buy rankings, but now with a small “Ad” label next to the results.

But even with the label, people still click.

The fundamental problem with search engines has never been whether there is 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, SEO has changed a letter to GEO, but the logic of selling rankings remains the same.

What has changed is the price.

GEO, Loved by Capital Markets

An indestructible business, most favored 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 aim to make AI better understand brand information.

This is completely different from the AI poisoning exposed on March 15th. LiQing is about fabricating products, creating parameters, and deceiving AI with false information; Pureblue uses real brand content to adapt to AI’s recommendation logic.

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

AI cannot 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.

Brokerages began holding conference calls to interpret GEO, calling it “the next-generation traffic entry in the AI era.” Funds 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 part of total income.

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 time, Chairman Zhao Wenquan announced he would reduce holdings by no more than 20 million shares. Based on the current stock 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 value increase of BlueFocus in one month far exceeded this figure.

The incident on March 15th, where LiQing system poisoned AI, cost only a few hundred yuan. But the GEO concept in A-shares made billions.

Whether it was poisoning or not is uncertain, but the profits are real.

March 15th 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 $8/month GPT users will see ads, while premium subscribers are unaffected.

On February 9th, 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 will not affect ChatGPT’s responses. Responses are responses; ads are ads, kept separate.

Does this sound familiar?

Baidu said the same back then. Paid rankings are paid rankings; organic search is organic. Later, the top five search results were all ads.

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

Looking back at the industry chain exposed on March 15th: LiQing injects soft articles into AI, making AI recommend nonexistent products. OpenAI places sponsored content below responses, making AI recommend paid products.

One is called poisoning without platform approval; the other is called commercialization 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 labeled “Ad.”

LiQing, which earned only a few hundred yuan, caused a few billion yuan in market value for GEO concepts in A-shares. OpenAI aims to make $17 billion a year from this.

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

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

This was the first formal academic definition of the concept.

From publication to the March 15th exposure, just over two years. During this time, gray industry, financing, concept stock surges, chairman cash-outs, and AI platforms directly selling ads all happened…

The path SEO took twenty years ago, GEO has 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 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 an extra second:

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