Late last year, Zhang Xuan’s small beef noodle joint in Shanghai suddenly began seeing a dramatic surge in orders. Sales over the past few months have been 50 to 60 per cent higher than normal, he estimates.

The driver? The new Street Stars feature on Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding’s Amap mapping app, which listed Zhang’s eatery as the fourth best restaurant in Shanghai’s Changning district.

Prominently displayed on Amap’s main page, the system uses artificial intelligence to rate venues based on a huge volume of user data, including foot traffic, movement patterns and verified customer feedback, according to the company.

The local recommendation guide is part of a broader revamp of Amap – China’s answer to Google Maps – as the service harnesses AI to provide its nearly 1 billion monthly users with an array of new features.

The navigation app now offers everything from hyper-specific area guides – showing not only the most popular businesses in each neighbourhood, but also which venue is popular with certain types of people – to 3D maps of indoor spaces such as cinemas and shopping malls.

The navigation app now offers everything from hyper-specific area guides – showing not only the most popular businesses in each neighbourhood, but also which venue is popular with certain types of people – to 3D maps of indoor spaces such as cinemas and shopping malls.

In the process, Amap is shaking up China’s vast local services market, which has long been dominated by rival Chinese tech giant Meituan. Amap Street Stars now offers “local favourites” guides for 269 Chinese cities, and businesses featured in the guides are seeing dramatic upticks in sales: merchants that appeared in the 2025 list saw orders soar by an average of 424 per cent year on year, while those in the “top picks” category logged a 159 per cent rise, according to company data.

“Amap has successfully built a consumer mindset around real offline visits by leveraging data on navigation routes and repeat visits,” said Bai Wenxi, chief economist at research platform China Enterprise Capital Union (CECU), adding that the strong order growth among small merchants suggested that Amap’s business model worked.

“Amap has successfully built a consumer mindset around real offline visits by leveraging data on navigation routes and repeat visits,” said Bai Wenxi, chief economist at research platform China Enterprise Capital Union (CECU), adding that the strong order growth among small merchants suggested that Amap’s business model worked.

A year on from the launch of Street Stars, Amap is now escalating its push with a sweeping technical upgrade – becoming a testing ground for Alibaba’s AI strategy.

The centrepiece of the update, rolled out earlier this month to mark the feature’s first anniversary, is Flying Street View 2.0.

Powered by ABot-Earth 0.7, which Amap describes as the world’s first native 3D urban world model, the system allows users to preview destinations – from theatre seats to shopping malls – in an interactive 3D environment, according to the company.

“If large language models help us process text, I hope Amap’s spatial intelligence can help us better explore the world,” Amap CEO Guo Ning said at the launch event.

The revamp highlights how the navigation unit, acquired by Alibaba in 2014, is transforming into an incubator for world models and embodied intelligence across the tech giant’s empire.

That effort is backed by Amap’s world models, like FantasyWorld, which simulates real-world environments to train AI systems.

The unit is also expanding into robotics. In July, Amap upgraded its ABot system, claiming it to be the first framework to integrate a robot’s “feet, hands, brain, central nervous system and motor nerves” into a single architecture. Amap’s AI pivot underscores how big tech firms view China’s local services sector as a launch pad for consumer AI applications. While Meituan has long dominated local transactions, deep-pocketed competitors like ByteDance’s Douyin and Amap are aggressively pushing into the market.

To win market share, Amap is leveraging a massive user base of 996 million monthly active users (MAUs), as disclosed by the company in January. By comparison, Meituan had 512 million MAUs in early 2026, according to data from research firm QuestMobile released in May.

The multi-platform rivalry is reshaping how small merchants acquire customers. “Previously, I only thought about how to boost ratings on Meituan,” noodle shop owner Zhang said. “Now Douyin and Amap have both become very important channels for getting new customers.” Some users are drawn to Amap’s algorithmic approach. “I like some of Amap’s niche rankings, like the best restaurants frequented by local taxi drivers, because that kind of data is harder to manipulate,” said Charlotte Li, an Amap user based in Shenzhen.

She added, however, that she still cross-checked with Meituan due to its “more comprehensive dining ecosystem”.

Meituan’s entrenched dominance stemmed in part from Amap’s incomplete transaction funnel, according to CECU’s Bai. “Even when users discover a great store on Amap, they are likely to jump over to Meituan to redeem group-buying deal vouchers because Amap does not treat completing transactions as its primary objective,” he said.

While contending with domestic challenges, Amap is beginning to export its AI-driven discovery tools overseas. Last week, in partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board, the platform launched Singapore Street Stars – its first international edition developed with a foreign national tourism agency.

The initiative introduces seven themed rankings spanning 104 attractions and lifestyle venues across the city state. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. By Ann Cao