Alibaba Group is stepping up its competition with Meituan in China’s hyper-competitive local services sector with the launch of a new AI-powered ranking system on its Amap navigation app. The feature, unveiled Wednesday at Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, is designed to position Amap as a lifestyle gateway for users by curating rankings of restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions across more than 300 cities.
The new feature, called Amap Street Stars, uses AI algorithms to synthesize data from navigation patterns, user reviews, and other signals to deliver tailored recommendations for over 1.6 million local businesses. Guo Ning, CEO of Amap, emphasized that the platform’s core principle is authenticity, with rankings based on “real behaviour and high credit ratings of a large number of users.”
The launch represents Alibaba’s latest move to take on Meituan’s dominance in restaurant discovery and local services. Meituan’s Dianping app has long been a go-to platform for restaurant ratings and reviews, and the company responded almost immediately by announcing plans to use AI to screen consumer reviews and roll out a “quality food delivery” service.
Industry observers see Amap’s new ranking function as a step forward in personalizing the local services experience. Lan Xiaohuan, economics professor at the China Europe International Business School, noted that the algorithm’s ability to consider contextual factors, such as weather conditions or time of day, could give it an edge over standardised rating systems.
Alibaba is backing the rollout with significant incentives, pledging over 1 billion yuan (US$140 million) in subsidies for ride-hailing trips and restaurant purchases to drive user engagement. The company projects the initiative could generate an additional 10 million daily customers for local businesses.
The launch also highlights Alibaba’s broader push to unify its business ecosystem and bolster its core e-commerce and lifestyle services operations amid intensifying competition from Meituan, PDD Holdings, JD.com, and ByteDance’s Douyin. Recent restructuring moves have seen Amap reclassified under “all other” businesses while platforms such as food delivery service Ele.me and travel agency Fliggy have been folded back into the company’s main e-commerce operations.
With Amap currently boasting 170 million daily active users, processing 120 million searches and 13 million navigation requests each day, the platform is well-positioned to become a central hub for consumer discovery. This latest AI-powered feature is another signal that Alibaba is betting big on algorithm-driven personalization as it evolves from a pure e-commerce player into what CEO Eddie Wu Yongming describes as a “comprehensive consumer platform.”