Even after navigating countless routes, you still cannot properly nail the deal-closing part.
“Those who focus on technology can’t beat those who focus on offline ground promotion.”
On social platforms, a netizen working in the catering industry made such a comment on the 2026 Amap Street-Sweeping List Annual Ecological Conference.
He said: “By comparison, Meituan’s Must-Eat List campaign is obviously more down-to-earth, and the speeches on the stage are expressed in words that individual catering business owners can fully understand. Amap’s Street-Sweeping List has been running for two years (two sessions), and it still has a strong technical style, giving physics lessons to small restaurant owners. Only people from Ali can do such a thing.”
A few words reveal the awkward core of Amap’s expansion from its core mapping business to local life services: its engineering mindset far outweighs the worldly liveliness of the market. However, the data released by Amap paints a different picture: one year after the Street-Sweeping List was launched, it has served more than 880 million users in total. The specific number of converted orders was not disclosed, and only a limited reference growth rate was announced to the public.
More ordinary than the vague data is that the “Mine-Sweeping List” expected by public opinion has not been launched, and it is replaced by a “Risk Avoidance Guide 1.0”.
Previously, internal test screenshots of Amap’s new function circulated on Maimai and Xiaohongshu, showing that the product planned to list restaurants, scenic spots, and hotels into negative lists such as queuing risk, experience risk, and hygiene risk respectively, and the page would also display the “risk point index” and “scale of users who encountered pitfalls”.
The market was stirred up, because there has long been information asymmetry in the consumption scenarios of local life: consumers are attracted by the marketing of internet-famous stores, but after arriving at the stores, they frequently encounter problems such as excessively long queues, temporary store closures, and parking difficulties. There is a real and huge demand for a genuine pit-avoidance tool.
But the final answer Amap delivered, the Risk Avoidance Guide 1.0, is not a static negative list, but an interactive travel assistant based on AI spatiotemporal deduction. It helps users predict travel experience risks such as wasted trips, traffic jams, and itinerary delays in advance from 15 dimensions including business hours, itinerary rhythm, parking prompts, and congestion prediction.
This means that Amap has retreated back to its comfort zone, abandoning the negative list that was most expected by public opinion and had the strongest impact, refusing to make sharp confrontational products, and avoiding the most likely viral hit product form.
From the perspective of product logic, this is understandable. A fixed negative blacklist of merchants involves multiple problems such as merchant reputation, information authenticity verification, and data compliance. Once misjudgment occurs, it will easily lead to large-scale merchant complaints and even legal disputes, which imposes very high requirements on the platform’s risk control, operation, and review capabilities.
But the problem is that local life is inherently a battlefield that emphasizes heavy operation. If Amap is unwilling to invest heavily, how can it change the competitive landscape?
Alibaba’s Big Ambition and Amap’s “Puffy Growth”
On September 10, 2025, Amap officially launched the “Street-Sweeping List”, aiming at the front-end entry of local life consumption decision-making.
Different from the model of traditional platforms such as Dianping that rely on users to actively write text and image reviews, the Street-Sweeping List pioneered a ranking mechanism generated based on user behavior data. To enhance public trust, Amap promised that the list will “never be commercialized” and will not accept paid listings.
The product function is directly embedded in the Amap App, supported by matching resources of the “Lively Good Stores Support Plan” with a scale of over 1 billion yuan, and the Street-Sweeping List soon achieved good results.
On January 7 this year, at the 2026 Amap Street-Sweeping List Press Conference, Guo Ning, CEO of Amap, revealed that the monthly active users of Amap App are close to 996 million, the number of Street-Sweeping List users has exceeded 660 million, a total of 860,000 merchants have settled in, and the number of sub-lists has reached 2559.
According to another QuestMobile report, as of March 2025, Amap Map had 873 million monthly active users. Against the backdrop of the fading mobile internet dividend, the user increment brought by the Street-Sweeping List to Amap App is still considerable.
Horizontally comparing mainstream internet platforms, QuestMobile data shows that as of March 2026, the monthly active users of Taobao, JD, and Meituan are 957 million, 598 million, and 512 million respectively. From this perspective, Amap is already a traffic entry that can rival Taobao.
In terms of order conversion, public information shows that the total orders of the 5115 merchants on the “Lively Small Stores List” in 2025 increased by 424% year-on-year one year later, while the orders of merchants on the “Top Champion List” increased by 159% in the same period.
Behind the booming growth data on the merchant side, there are still unproven core goals. Guo Ning once put forward a specific expectation that the Street-Sweeping List will bring 10 million additional in-store consumers to offline stores every day. The official has not disclosed whether this key indicator has been achieved.
Even so, the Street-Sweeping List still received recognition from the group level. In the New Year’s family letter released by Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group, on January 18, he listed Amap, together with Taobao Flash Purchase and Qwen App, as one of the “several well-fought major battles” in 2025.
However, the group’s verbal commendation has not been transformed into equivalent resource allocation. The performance of the Street-Sweeping List has failed to change Amap’s awkward positioning within Alibaba.
When Alibaba shrank its original “1+6+N” structure in 2025, Amap was excluded from the important “Life Services Sector”, and was grouped into “All Other Businesses” alongside Qwen, DingTalk, Youku, Freshippo, Cainiao, Damai Entertainment, etc.
In August this year, Alibaba carried out another organizational restructuring: Freshippo was integrated with Alibaba China E-Commerce Group and Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group to form the “Alibaba E-Commerce Group”; the AI Model Lab, Qwen 2C Division and Qwen Office were integrated to form the “AI Lab and Applications”, while Amap still remains in the “All Other” sector.
Alibaba’s sector division measures strategic functions, not just user scale or product popularity. At present, Alibaba focuses on its core strategies of e-commerce and cloud, and announced that it will invest over 380 billion yuan in cloud and AI hardware infrastructure construction in the next three years, for which it does not hesitate to conduct a new share placement of 80 billion Hong Kong dollars.
Amap’s main business of navigation maps has relatively weak direct cooperation with these two core businesses. In the face of the record-breaking AI capital investment, Alibaba naturally hopes that Amap can “do great things with small money”, allowing it to explore independently and prove its own value, but the premise is that it must not become a financial burden for the group.
This is where Amap’s “puffy growth” lies: it has a huge user base, but cannot obtain matching strategic weight and resource allocation. The group not only expects Amap to take the lead in Alibaba’s new round of local life offensive and connect Alibaba’s consumer ecosystem, but also does not support it to seize too many resources and ecological positions of other core businesses.
In this case, Amap is like a hunter with a limited activity range: it can find prey, but cannot take action on its own.
Products like the Street-Sweeping List essentially represent Amap’s attempt to break away from the label of a pure navigation tool, proving that it can secure a differentiated position in Alibaba’s AI and consumer ecosystem. However, the limited injection of resource allocation from the group level makes it difficult for Amap to delve deep enough into local life, and it can only engage in stock game with Meituan and Douyin within its existing capability boundary.
Traffic Is Visible, But Transaction Closed Loop Is Hard to Achieve
The core barrier of the local life track lies in opening up the complete closed loop from traffic to transaction. Meituan’s classic strategy is to use the high-frequency food delivery business to divert traffic to the high-margin in-store business, so that traffic circulates within the Meituan system, and customer acquisition costs can be continuously reduced.
Alibaba’s traffic linkage framework seems similar, using near-field instant e-commerce to feed back far-field shelf e-commerce, with all designs prioritizing serving the retail basic market. However, there is a clear break in the local life chain, and this system does not make up for the fulfillment and operation capabilities of in-store scenarios specifically for local life.
Amap’s core assets are location POI data, covering basic information such as store coordinates, business status, and visiting passenger flow, but it has not built a native, deeply operated merchant supply system. The group purchase supply largely depends on the external supply of Taobao Flash Purchase, and it does not master the full-chain capabilities from merchant settlement, package listing, verification and settlement to after-sales service.
Some consumers use Amap group purchase codes to consume in stores, but encounter the dilemma that merchants cannot verify the codes, which is a direct reflection that the supply and fulfillment link has not been fully operated smoothly.
Comparing with the strategies of industry competitors, we can more clearly see the obvious gap in investment logic.
In 2023, Douyin launched its food delivery pilot, officially launching an impact on Meituan. Facing the competition, Alibaba transferred Koubei to Amap in March 2023, which was a stop-loss resource reallocation, and the in-store business has since survived in a dependent manner.
In the following two years, the local life in-store arena was basically a two-player game between Meituan and Douyin. Media data shows that Meituan’s in-store market share dropped from 70% to 60%, while Douyin’s rose from 30% to 40%; a Nomura Securities survey shows that Meituan’s in-store business grew by 23% in 2025, only about half of Douyin’s growth rate.
Before the launch of Amap’s Street-Sweeping List in September 2025, Alibaba was almost absent from the in-store market, which objectively made Douyin lack an external restraining force.
In 2026, Douyin increased its investment in the in-store track and launched the independent group purchase product Doushengsheng. Different from the native group purchase in short videos, Doushengsheng strips out live streaming and short video content, focuses on search and coupons, targets Dianping, and aims at purpose-driven consumer users.
Douyin has launched a complete set of combined punches for this new business: opening an exclusive diversion entrance on the main app, issuing subsidies to users, new users can receive a maximum of 12-yuan coupon every day in the first week; at the same time, Doushengsheng is included in the official merchant support system, opening the tens of millions of DAU entrance to merchants, supporting merchant incentives and operation services, and giving priority to the construction of merchant supply.
QuestMobile data shows that as of June 30, Doushengsheng has reached 21.03 million daily active users, which is very close to Dianping’s 32.6057 million daily active users, and has made considerable progress in less than half a year since its launch.
In contrast, the Street-Sweeping List was supported by subsidies of over 1 billion yuan in the initial stage, with more resources tilted towards list exposure and user-side traffic driving; investment in merchant-side ground promotion expansion, merchant training, in-depth operation, and fulfillment infrastructure is relatively limited.
As you sow, so shall you reap. Amap has achieved considerable growth in traffic data, while the conversion in transaction volume is still in its infancy.
Who Is Amap Responsible For?
Amap’s current situation faintly shows a sense of fate that it will repeat the old path of Koubei. Koubei was acquired by Alibaba in 2008, and was successively placed in the systems of Taobao, Alipay, and Ele.me. In 2023, it was officially merged into Amap, completing its fifth business transfer.
Alibaba’s old story in local life is happening on Amap once again.
As early as 2006, Alibaba injected capital into Koubei.com and launched its first layout of local life. At that time, the group hoped that Koubei would take on the important task of in-store business, but was unwilling to give sufficient operation permissions and supporting resources.
Merchant supply and review system are the two major moats of in-store business, which require long-term and stable investment to polish. However, along with Alibaba’s frequent strategic and organizational adjustments, Koubei has always lacked a stable environment for deep cultivation of business.
After 20 years of industry evolution, Meituan and Dianping have completed the integration of the track, building mature user mindset, merchant network and business closed loop; Koubei has been reduced to an affiliated business after several twists and turns, gradually breaking away from front-line competition, and finally merged into Amap, completely retreating to the background.
Now Amap takes over the baton from Alibaba to attack the local life market, and also takes over the unsolved dilemma that Koubei faced back then.
After several years of rapid expansion, the local life in-store market has formed a pattern of two strong rivals, Meituan and Douyin, and industry competition continues to intensify. In such a track environment, the rumored “Mine-Sweeping List” was originally a clever differentiated breakthrough idea for Amap.
Information asymmetry is a long-standing stubborn problem in local life consumption. The topic “Stores with low scores may taste better” once hit the hot search, a large number of consumers were misled by mixed true and false store exploration content, and actively explored and shared strategies for good stores with low scores, which itself confirms the current situation that the platform’s positive review system is distorted.
The Street-Sweeping List tries to rely on navigation behavior data to solve this pain point. Users’ navigation visit trajectories are difficult to be artificially brushed, but a large number of navigation visits often only mean convenient geographical location, not excellent store service or taste. It is essentially similar to the check-in behavior on Dianping, and cannot be directly equated with positive reviews.
More critically, Amap can bring traffic to merchants, but it is difficult to output a complete set of full merchant operation services. Without a self-built ground promotion iron army and lacking in-depth merchant operation capabilities, most merchants will not regard Amap as their core operation position, but only treat it as an online channel that needs to be maintained.
The launch of Risk Avoidance Guide 1.0, in a sense, represents a strategic contraction, which is a compromise product under multiple practical contradictions. Amap has retreated from “judging merchants” back to its core position of travel services, abandoned the negative list that is easy to cause merchant rebound, and turned to AI tools for risk prediction.
Amap has not announced a clear commercialization timetable to the public, but an invisible patience countdown has already started.
In Alibaba’s current strategic priority ranking, Amap’s priority ranks after e-commerce and AI businesses. When the group proposes to “fully guarantee the resource supply of AI businesses”, all other businesses must carefully control costs, and the incremental resources Amap can obtain are imaginable.
In this case, Amap may forever only be a “traffic discoverer
