Diners enjoy barbecue at a restaurant in Xuzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province, on August 7, 2024. Photo: VCG

Alibaba's mapping app Amap is providing local-lifestyle services on Wednesday by launching its own ranking of restaurants, hotels and tourist destinations.

Alibaba's location-based services platform, Amap, has launched "Amap Street Stars," an AI-powered ranking to help its 170 million daily active users discover the beloved local favourites. 

Under Alibaba's user-first strategy, this launch will advance Amap's role as the gateway for lifestyle services, according to the information the company sent to the Global Times on Wednesday.

Featured on the Amap app homepage, the ranking uses AI algorithms to synthesize multiple data points - including navigation patterns and genuine user reviews - to rank offline destinations, everything from local restaurants and hotels to tourist attractions. Amap anticipates this initiative will help bring an additional 10 million daily customers to these local businesses, said the company. 

At launch, "Street Stars" covers over 300 cities and features recommendations for 1.6 million local businesses.

The launch will escalate the competition between the Alibaba ecosystem and Meituan, said Liu Dingding, a Beijing-based independent tech analyst, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Amap is challegening the core business territories of multiple companies such as Meituan, Liu said.

While Liu said the move is built on Amap's AI advantage, which the company introduced advanced spatial intelligence to deliver proactive, personalized, location-based services, and marks the next step of its AI evolution.

The progression follows comments from Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu, whoemphasized Amap's importance on a recent earnings call, as a "new gateway for future lifestyle services".

Notably, on Wednesday, Dianping also announced the "re-launch" of its premium food delivery service. 

According to an official Meituan release, starting immediately, Dianping will formally "restart" its premium food delivery offering. Leveraging its self-developed B-end large language model and analyzing user needs through massive authentic review data, the platform will further filter out non-genuine reviews, providing reliable decision-making support for users via "AI + authentically high-rated selections." The initial phase has already aggregated over a million highly rated dine-in restaurants.

The catering sector, a major pillar of China's consumption-driven economy, continues to show strong signs of recovery and growth despite ongoing challenges. As of now, China boasts over 15.568 million active and well-established catering-related enterprises, including 406,000 new ones being registered in 2025, China National Radio (CNP) reported on March 24, 2025, citing company information website Tianyancha.

Over the past five years, the number of registrations for catering-related enterprises has shown a year-on-year increasing trend, reaching its peak in 2024, said the CNR report.

Global Times