Alibaba breaks through local life

Alibaba has once again wielded its AI sword in the battlefield of local lifestyle services.

Following last year's release of the "Sweeping Street Rankings," on January 7th, Amap has announced "Amap Sweeping Street Rankings 2026," with its trump card being a world model that has been in the making for some time. According to reports, merchants only need to upload photos or videos to quickly generate a realistic 3D model of their shop, similar to an immersive “real scene shop visit.” Before entering the store, users can use VR to preview both the interior and exterior, experience the surrounding environment, scenery along the way, parking, window seats, etc.

World models represent the newest trend in the AI industry. Unlike large language models that can only chat, they enable AI to understand the physical world and predict future changes like humans do. Amap officially announced an investment of billions in computing power resources to introduce world models to the Sweeping Street Rankings, which seems like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

From an industry perspective, this may be Alibaba's "ecosystem blitz" in local lifestyle—leveraging its strengths in AI to reshape how merchants connect with consumers.

In fact, for a long time, online presentations of local life services have remained in the era of images and text. Meituan and Dianping have built a formidable content moat through years of accumulated user reviews and merchant photos.

Traditionally, it has been difficult for merchants to recreate the spatial feel of brick-and-mortar shops in the digital world. Alibaba's Tongyi Lab's visual generation large model technology solves this pain point, reducing what used to require tens of thousands in cost and weeks of time to “zero barrier.”

For merchants, this is an upgrade in marketing dimensions; for users, 3D shop visits provide an immersive "what you see is what you get" experience: Are the seats spacious? Is the décor stylish, is the window view good? Instead of piecing together answers from dozens of reviews, now users can directly perceive this by swiping on their screen.

Insiders believe Alibaba is trying to increase the granularity and realism of information display, intercepting Meituan’s traffic at the very start of user decisions—i.e. "where to eat."

Amap "Flying Street View" product manager Sun Chong told Wallstreetcn that Flying Street View is not just a cool tech demo, but rather a bridge built by Amap for users to cross the huge gap between online information and offline experience.

Amap has now evolved from a simple navigation tool into Alibaba’s top weapon against Meituan.

Over the past twenty years, Amap has accumulated massive space-time data about people, cars, roads, and shops. Now, Amap has woven these into an insightful network. In August 2023, Amap completed a comprehensive AI upgrade and shifted to spatial intelligence, releasing the "Sweeping Street Rankings" the following month.

Internally designated by Alibaba as an "S-level strategic project," the product directly targets Meituan's core profit source: "in-store business."

Meituan's moat has two parts: the massive rider network ensuring fulfillment capability, and the huge merchant-user bilateral network effect. For the former, Alibaba wrestles through Ele.me; for the latter, Alibaba now chooses to use AI to trade for time.

As a map app, it is the most precise physical interface connecting online and offline. However, Amap's long-standing pain point has been its overly utilitarian tool aspect and weak content attributes. Users are used to using Amap to find routes but Meituan to find shops.

Data shows that in 2024, Meituan’s annual transacting users surpassed 770 million, and its active merchants reached 14.5 million, providing an extremely wide moat. Since its founding in 2003, Dianping has amassed massive user-generated content, with a cumulative total of 363 million genuine reviews in 2024. In 2025, these key numbers continue to grow.

This content moat, along with the consumer habit of "checking reviews before eating out," clearly cannot be replicated by Alibaba in the short term. But Alibaba soon found a loophole.

Currently, merchants are highly sensitive to marketing budgets. Meituan's auction ranking and commission model puts considerable pressure on merchants. Instead of relying on subjective written reviews, Amap's Sweeping Street Rankings leverage real-life user data from its billion-plus users—navigation, searches, collections, etc.—and were released accordingly.

Soon after, Meituan fought back by announcing the relaunch of Dianping’s "quality takeout" service, deploying its self-developed B-end large model and combining it with its massive in-house dine-in review data, while introducing an active program to support merchants, all aimed at retaining the merchant base and preventing top merchants from shifting to Alibaba’s platform.

But Alibaba's CEO Wu Yongming has said that the biggest variable in the next decade will be the deep, industry-wide transformation brought by AI. Alibaba is trying to use AI as a key to unlock new doors in local lifestyle. When Amap can more vividly and truly restore offline scenarios than Meituan, it gains a differentiated competitive edge.

Alibaba has a natural advantage in AI tool development and implementation, with powerful computing infrastructure and large model capabilities, and converting these tech strengths into business "killer apps" is key to finding growth in a mature market. Conversely, for Meituan to achieve comparable technical coverage, it will have to pay higher costs in time and money to defend its turf.

Overall, Alibaba is trying to shift the competitive dimension to its strengths in "computing power" and "algorithms," to avoid its disadvantages in "ground marketing" and "operations." The battle between both sides is essentially a strategic positioning for dominance of local life services over the next decade.

Of course, "Flying Street View" alone is far from enough to overturn Meituan’s dominance. User consumption habits carry tremendous inertia, and at its core, local lifestyle services will still depend on price, taste, and fulfillment capability. The future situation remains variable.

However, Alibaba’s move sends a clear signal: the second half of the local lifestyle battlefield will no longer be just subsidy wars or traffic allocations, but an efficiency revolution driven by technology empowerment.

For Alibaba, using AI as a sword to strike local lifestyle is an attempt to prove that in the age of AI for everything, the giants who wield the latest productivity tools will still have the ability to rewrite the old order.

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