After burning through hundreds of billions in funding, both Meituan and Douyin thought they were the only players left at the table. However, Alibaba has been watching from the sidelines with keen interest.
On September 10, Alibaba's 26th anniversary, a chess piece laid down 11 years ago by Jack Ma - Gaode Maps - was suddenly activated by current CEO Wu Yongming. No longer content with being just a silent navigation tool, it charged directly into the frontline battleground where Meituan and Douyin face off, armed with over 11 billion yuan in subsidies and a so-called fraud-proof "Street Sweeping Rankings."
This moment came exactly eleven years after Ma spent nearly $1.5 billion to acquire Gaode, withstanding external pressure from those who "didn't understand" the move. What was once a forward-looking strategic piece has now become the decisive move that could shake up the entire game.
What Gaode seeks to compete for is not just transactions, but the power to define the next generation of consumer scenarios. Together with Taobao Flash Delivery, it will become an important tool for Alibaba to reshape local life services.
This fundamental intention to rewrite the rules of the game signals the return of the Alibaba known for its wolf-like nature and surprise attacks to the center of the battlefield.
This time, the story it tells is completely different. Alibaba will no longer be just an online e-commerce empire, but a dual-habitat giant that explores AI's digital future with one hand while activating the physical world of real commerce with the other. Its new value lies not only in cloud computing power but also in the vitality of every street on the ground.
**Gaode's Strike**
Sources close to the matter reveal that since late June this year, a Gaode project team was stationed at the Hangzhou global headquarters, even carving out a separate space in Building C4 of the Xixi campus. According to insiders, the secrecy level was very high, with other departments unable to enter.
Subsequently, news about Alibaba's secret project spread like wildfire. Some guessed it was an upgrade battle for flash delivery, others speculated major AI moves. Now, three months later, the mystery is solved - Alibaba chose to let Gaode "sweep the streets."
The core strategy of "Gaode Street Sweeping Rankings" is to ensure an unmanipulable ranking through users' real "behavior + credit," according to sources. Gaode CEO Guo Ning believes that authenticity is the lifeblood of rankings, and improving consumer trust helps boost consumer confidence. He stated directly that "Gaode Street Sweeping Rankings" will never be commercialized and will introduce Alipay's Sesame Credit system to filter fake and noise reviews.
From insiders' perspective, "Gaode Street Sweeping Rankings" is essentially an innovation in offline service credit systems. Merchants can distance themselves from operational unwritten rules like "brushing scores for traffic" and "giving gifts for good reviews," allowing good stores and small shops that operate seriously but aren't skilled at traffic games to be seen by more people. Guo Ning hopes this move will create an ecosystem where good money drives out bad, reducing consumers' selection costs.
This isn't empty talk. The rankings' data comes from 228 billion kilometers walked by 51.32 million real users over the past year, screening out 1.18 million shops repeatedly visited by users among 1.3 billion navigation behaviors. Hence, the rankings feature unique categories like "Tire Wear Rankings" and "Repeat Customer Rankings." The former reflects the attraction that makes users willing to cross half the city specifically to visit; the latter represents the most simple recognition of taste and quality.
Notably, before Gaode's "street sweeping," competitors had already launched mature products like "Must-Eat Lists" and "Black Pearl Restaurant Guides." But Alibaba's betting determination is set. Besides mobilizing the entire group's capabilities, Gaode also deployed subsidies to accelerate market penetration this time.
On the day "Street Sweeping Rankings" was released, Gaode announced the "Neighborhood Good Stores Support Plan," preparing 200 million yuan and 950 million yuan in consumer vouchers for travel and transactions respectively. Gaode will also provide 50 million precise traffic exposures for quality small stores through homepage AI recommendations and search keyword pushes, while investing 30 million yuan in incentives on content creation platforms.
It can be said that Gaode has injected catalysts into almost every link of the store visit transaction. Currently, Alibaba's internal consensus is to cultivate Gaode into an offline entry point comparable to Taobao. This "open conspiracy" has actually been brewing for some time.
Gaode's entry is defined internally as an S-level project on par with "Taobao Flash Delivery." Sources close to Gaode revealed that "Koubei," which originally focused on store visit group buying, was restarted several months ago. Going forward, Gaode's store visit business will clearly move toward transactions, with food being the highest-frequency entry point.
From this point on, Gaode is no longer the simple navigation software in people's minds, but has become a key link for Alibaba to connect real consumption and transaction scenarios.
Currently, while the food delivery war has somewhat subsided, the tug-of-war between Ele.me, Meituan, and Douyin continues, with no party daring to relax in the competition for entry points. But Alibaba is unwilling to fall into pure attrition warfare. The latest financial results have greatly boosted internal morale, and to press their advantage, Alibaba needs to enter businesses with incremental growth and greater imagination space.
Over the past four years, Douyin's ability to overtake in local life services was due to its massive user base and traffic allocation. This is also Gaode's advantage. Guo Ning revealed for the first time that Gaode Maps covers over 7 million restaurant locations nationwide, with currently 120 million daily searches related to life services and 13 million daily navigations to life service categories on average.
Clearly, Gaode already possesses a massive user base and high-frequency usage scenarios, with closer connections to local life.
Industry insiders believe that when users use Gaode, they often have clear travel and destination consumption needs. Deeply integrating store visit services with map navigation functions can naturally reach users, forming a closed loop of "finding locations - navigation - store consumption." This is smoother and more efficient than building a new platform from scratch or guiding users to store visits on Taobao and Tmall.
In summary, with its user base, platform capabilities, and Alibaba Group's strategic support, Gaode becomes the ideal "first step" for Alibaba to expand store visit business. According to insiders, Ele.me is also testing store visit business in some areas, while Taobao Flash Delivery is exploring how to follow up and collaborate.
Going forward, Gaode serves both as a showcase for local business and enables deeper integration with other products under the group. It can be said that Alibaba's counterattack strategy has just begun to unfold.
**Giants in Battle**
In Alibaba's operational sequence, victory in one battle is often the prelude to another, larger campaign.
Just at the end of August, Alibaba E-commerce Group CEO Jiang Fan described at the earnings call how "Taobao Flash Delivery" won key nodes in instant retail. Just over a week later, this giant quickly turned its firepower on September 10 - a date of special significance for its anniversary - toward another more intense field that's more crucial for the future: local life services.
Previously, Alibaba tried to enter local life through Taobao and Alipay, but user mindset remained misaligned. Gaode, however, had already entered users' daily lives through its indispensable tool attributes. Now, what Alibaba needs to do is not laboriously get users to download a new app, but leverage Gaode to build a fully functional consumer city.
All these moves ultimately point to the "big consumption platform" vision proposed by Group CEO Wu Yongming. If "Taobao Flash Delivery" is the pillar satisfying users' home delivery needs, then Gaode becomes the key hub carrying all destination scenarios, completing the final piece of Alibaba's consumption landscape puzzle.
Alibaba's return breaks the dual-hero confrontation narrative that Meituan and Douyin maintained for years in the local life battlefield. The players at the table haven't changed, but the nature of the game and their respective expressions have become completely different.
For the first time, Meituan feels the chill of being attacked from both front and rear. With Douyin continuously attacking from the front and Alibaba from behind flying the banner of trust to influence user decisions. On the same day as Gaode's launch event, Meituan quickly "restarted" quality food delivery, brandishing "AI + real high scores" and throwing out massive subsidies.
Meanwhile, Douyin, which only began pushing local business in 2021, leveraged traffic advantages for rapid offensive, with this year's GMV target reaching 900 billion yuan. It has also been focusing on "AI + quality food delivery" to make up for its shortcomings and compete with Meituan.
The battle situation has thus become delicate. In the past, local life wars were about competing for user mindset to become the sole, dominant life service entry point. Now, with segmented user behavior, all parties compete for the most valuable and critical node in users' fragmented cross-platform consumption process.
Alibaba's move hopes that users' choice results will be influenced by rankings measured by real footsteps through Gaode, and use this as a fulcrum to leverage and capture the entire transaction closed loop.
Gaode's current "content-only" approach is clearly not the strategic endgame. As Alibaba continues deepening store visit business, it will definitely cut into transaction links. It may even grow a consumption entry as massive as Taobao on Gaode's foundation.
When the market almost focused all of Alibaba's narrative on AI, Gaode's entry provides an equally important but more down-to-earth dimension. This dimension is rooted in streets and alleys rather than the cloud. While AI defines the future of the digital world, Gaode's mission is to use technology to reconstruct and activate the physical world full of real transactions and experiences.
In the future, Alibaba's value will depend not only on AI competition success or failure, but more on whether it can prove its ability to seamlessly connect digital and physical worlds, becoming true infrastructure for the big consumption era.
Regardless of how the final battle evolves, Gaode's strike has already declared: the Alibaba once known for its wolf-like nature and "All in" belief is regaining its offensive posture under Wu Yongming's leadership. This marks not only the beginning of a new war in local life services but possibly signals the arrival of a new era of competition among Chinese internet giants.
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