Building a quality street sweep ranking is just the first step; AutoNavi says it's "unclear" about the next moves

On September 10, AutoNavi, owned by Alibaba, announced the launch of "AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking." This is a lifestyle service ranking system generated based on users' real travel behavior and integrated with AI technology, with most businesses on the current list being restaurants.

AutoNavi stated that the purpose of creating this ranking is to build an offline service credit system. Based on AutoNavi's core navigation business, it combines real navigation-to-store behavior with user evaluation feedback, avoiding the problem of conventional rankings being easily manipulated through fake reviews and inflated scores. It's difficult for merchants to game the AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking.

AutoNavi CEO Guo Ning even stated that the "AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking" will never be commercialized.

Li Gang, product manager of AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking, explained that they hope this ranking will maximize the restoration of customers' real feelings about a store, providing people with authentic reference guidance while allowing stores to escape the meaningless competition of being forced to manipulate ratings.

AutoNavi simultaneously launched the "Local Business Support Plan," encouraging users to visit stores through measures including distributing over 1 billion yuan in subsidies.

Consumer traffic from platforms to offline stores for consumption, commonly known as "to-store business," is another core business for Meituan besides food delivery. With AutoNavi under Alibaba beginning to cover to-store business, and Taobao Flash and Ele.me being aggressive in food delivery, an unnamed Alibaba insider stated that Alibaba's goal is to enter Meituan's business territory from both sides.

On the same day, half an hour before Alibaba's official press conference began, Meituan published an article on its official WeChat account stating that the complete system behind hundreds of millions of reviews on Dianping represents the "rating standard" for China's restaurant industry. High-scoring restaurants on Dianping are synonymous with "quality," and various new food delivery platforms also use "Dianping high-scoring merchants" as a necessary condition for selection when recruiting businesses.

Meituan simultaneously announced on its official WeChat account that Dianping is restarting quality food delivery. Through B-end self-developed large models combined with massive real review data analysis of user needs, it will further eliminate non-authentic review data to create "AI + real high scores." At the same time, it will distribute 25 million various types of large-value "quality food delivery" coupons.

Since the food delivery war between JD, Meituan, and Alibaba began, market regulators have continuously worked to cool down this commercial battle. On September 9, Wang Qiuping, spokesperson for the State Administration for Market Regulation, said that the administration has promptly interviewed major food delivery platforms, and relevant platforms have responded quickly, promising to strictly abide by laws and regulations and eliminate unfair competition.

The trend of the food delivery war is becoming stable, but the new round of positioning battles among internet giants in the era of new business and new technology is just beginning.

**New Strategies**

The "AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking" was initiated in June, with project members concentrating from Beijing to Hangzhou for office work, representing a completely new product. The merchant comprehensive scoring in the Street Sweep Ranking incorporates dimensions including navigation, search, store visits, and favorites, then uses AI model-driven calculations to derive scores that serve as the ranking basis.

AutoNavi claims that incorporating user behavior indicators is what makes the AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking unique compared to conventional ranking products. Traditional food ranking products rely on consumer reviews, making it difficult to distinguish authenticity, turning fake reviews and ranking manipulation into an open secret business. Especially since high-scoring stores often receive more traffic exposure, this has spawned a gray industry of fake reviews, trapping many merchants in the cycle of "no traffic without manipulation, can't stop once started," while consumers are frequently "kidnapped" by merchants to leave positive reviews.

The core of AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking is to use users' "behavior + credit" to create an authentic and credible ranking that cannot be manipulated, thereby rebuilding an offline service credit system. AutoNavi believes that whether a restaurant tastes good or a scenic spot is worth visiting, "voting with your feet" is more convincing.

"High-scoring stores might be fake, but store visit behavior doesn't lie," Li Gang believes. Massive real store visit behavior data gives AutoNavi hope to provide the most authentic scoring system and rebuild a more credible lifestyle service credit system.

AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking incorporates Alipay's Sesame Credit system. After obtaining user authorization, this ranking introduces Alipay's Sesame Credit system, combining user credit levels to weight credible evaluations and using AI risk control to identify and filter fake reviews.

In August this year, AutoNavi announced comprehensive AI transformation, not only providing destination navigation services but also being able to independently reason and make decisions, proactively recommending desired destinations for users.

"AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking" has covered 1.6 million offline merchants in over 300 cities, including more than 870,000 restaurants, 230,000 hotels, and nearly 50,000 scenic spots.

Opening the Street Sweep Ranking, users will see rankings corresponding to different types of behavior, including the "Tire Wear Ranking" reflecting long-distance special trips, the "Repeat Customer Ranking" reflecting multiple visits, and various rankings for local favorites, city characteristic experiences, and high-scoring local small stores.

According to AutoNavi, the "AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking" focuses more on exposure and ranking of neighborhood small stores, not favoring restaurants with influencer marketing. The first batch of 2,962 local small stores on the "Local Small Store Ranking" covers 61 cities nationwide, including deep alley old stores passed down through generations and husband-and-wife small restaurants. AutoNavi says this initiative aims to make good stores and small stores that operate seriously but aren't good at traffic tactics more visible to people.

On the day of the Street Sweep Ranking release, AutoNavi announced the launch of the "Local Business Support Plan," distributing over 1 billion yuan in subsidies to encourage offline consumption. These subsidies will be used in three areas. First is travel subsidies, with AutoNavi providing 200 million yuan worth of exclusive store visit travel subsidy packages for users whose departure or destination is offline merchants, including public transportation subsidies, ride-hailing coupons, and fuel coupons to subsidize users' travel costs.

Second is transaction subsidies, with AutoNavi distributing 950 million yuan in consumption coupons to encourage users to experience local good stores, including store discount coupons and signature dish discounts, with all costs borne by the platform.

Third is traffic subsidies, providing 50 million precise exposures daily for quality local small stores through homepage AI recommendations, search keyword pushes, and navigation voice broadcasts. Additionally, providing 30 million yuan in platform incentives, widely inviting industry influencers to help small stores create quality promotional content.

Having promised not to use the Street Sweep Ranking to make money, what are the next plans as a commercial organization? What is the mission of AutoNavi's new business for Alibaba's overall strategy? Will AutoNavi's offline business integrate with Taobao Flash's online business?

Regarding these questions, Li Gang did not answer during the September 10 interview, stating "building the Street Sweep Ranking well is the first step, and it's unclear what to do next."

**Challenging Dianping?**

"AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking" is not Alibaba's first foray into ranking products. In 2008, Alibaba fully acquired Koubei.com, holding a ranking card ever since. Koubei.com was previously a direct competitor to Dianping in Meituan's portfolio. However, Koubei has experienced a turbulent fate within Alibaba's ecosystem, having been successively integrated into Taobao, Alipay, Ele.me, and AutoNavi businesses, with multiple "restarts" and periods of dormancy.

The day before Alibaba released "AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking," there were continuous market speculations that Alibaba would restart "Koubei.com" for the third time. After AutoNavi revealed the mystery, it clarified this is a completely new business. However, based on the actions and conceptual information this business has released to the outside world, some viewpoints believe AutoNavi is launching a frontal challenge to Dianping.

Dianping has always been a "trump card" in Meituan's hand, with a traffic foundation influencing users' dining choices and a merchant foundation where businesses work hard to achieve high ratings and rankings on this platform, manipulating order volumes to attract more consumers.

As early as 2014, Dianping launched food delivery services and introduced "Quality Food Delivery" in 2016. In 2022, Dianping and Meituan Food Delivery jointly launched the "Quality Food Delivery" entrance, screening out high-scoring dine-in restaurants available for delivery.

Meituan claims that subsequently, various new food delivery platforms have adopted the "quality" concept when recruiting merchants, using "Dianping high scores" as a necessary condition for merchant selection on their recruitment pages.

In this year's food delivery war, Dianping did not directly participate until late August when Meituan began launching the "Quality Food Delivery" channel on Dianping. On September 10, Meituan announced that over 1,400 restaurants from the 2025 "Must-Eat List," nearly 30 restaurants from the 2025 "Black Pearl" list, and nearly 1,500 high-star hotel restaurants have all joined Dianping's "Quality Food Delivery."

On June 25 this year, Li Shubin, Senior Vice President of Meituan, mentioned in a media interview that Dianping's information structuring is the best. Meituan has a strong infrastructure team and a mapping team with self-built mapping capabilities that match professional mapping companies. For example, while precisely locating tens of millions of merchants' addresses on the platform, they must also update each merchant's operating hours and other information in real time. "There aren't many companies nationwide capable of such information infrastructure."

At that time, Cheng Yueyue, head of Dianping's marketing, stated that they would not influence ranking reviews or screening rules based on merchants' business cooperation relationships or commercialization demands, and Dianping App has no so-called commercialization goals or business-related content.

Regarding AutoNavi's challenge, Wang Hongdong, restaurant industry analyst and founder of Canbao Dictionary, believes it's "difficult but the idea is right."

He thinks the possibility of AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking shaking Dianping in the short term is small, and instead, it will face huge challenges itself.

From usage habits, Douyin and Ctrip both have rankings, but consumers still recognize Dianping.

From user accumulation perspective, AutoNavi has a large user base and traffic, but AutoNavi's users are stratified. "Ride-hailing users and review users are actually two different groups. AutoNavi can use technical means, such as behavior and credit data, and gradually screen out these high-quality users."

Wang Hongdong's view is that Dianping has accumulated a group of high-quality review users over many years, which is a very difficult process and represents Dianping's core competitive advantage. In Wang Hongdong's view, AutoNavi still has a large gap compared to Dianping in restaurant user base, and Dianping's long-accumulated high-value, high-quality, high-stickiness users are difficult for Alibaba to surpass in the short term.

He believes that for platform companies, rankings are indeed a tool, on one hand aggregating offline merchants, and on the other hand promoting other businesses, such as store visits.

For merchants, Dianping is an important channel. Although the review system remains controversial, its ratings are still the reference basis for most consumers when looking for restaurants, and rankings bring tangible traffic conversion for merchants.

"Dianping's Must-Eat List, once you're on it, performance increases. And when negative reviews appear, store business is affected." In Wang Hongdong's previous research, listed merchants indicated sales would increase by 20%-30%. Meituan data shows that after the 2024 Must-Eat List was released, newly listed merchants' non-local user traffic and "Must-Eat Festival" drove overall merchant transaction scale to increase by 50%.

Restaurant merchants welcome new competition between platforms. Hu Junjie, brand operations manager at Xiangkeji, stated that they hope AutoNavi Street Sweep Ranking can gradually develop and become another force in restaurant evaluation. "A three-way battle is better than one dominant player," he said.

He frankly admitted that being on the Must-Eat List or other Dianping rankings has value and significantly drives performance. However, "Dianping's rating maintenance cost is currently the highest among internet platforms."