Amap (高德地图), a navigation app owned by Alibaba, saw an unexpected spike in traffic over the holidays. This year’s eight-day Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday saw the app’s new ‘Street Scanning List’ (扫街榜) draw over 100 million Amap users to offline eateries around China. The feat is so record-breaking that netizens picked up on it, driving the hashtag ‘During the National Day holiday, Amap drove 100 million people to offline restaurants’ (#高德十一为线下餐饮带去1亿人#) to number 28 on Weibo’s hot search.
- (#高德十一为线下餐饮带去1亿人#) to number 28 on Weibo’s hot search, with the thread receiving 25.745 million visits.
This surge in Amap’s user activity is pretty unusual for the app. In fact, its highest-ever user count was recorded over this period, with a spike of 360 million daily active users on 1st October. The Street Scanning List amassed more than 400 million users in just 23 days, claiming its share of attention.
The feature curates local food rankings based on navigation data, tracking footfall to restaurants and collating it into a list of the most popular places to eat. In a country largely obsessed with food culture, that’s a very powerful tool.
Most popular of all were the ‘smoke-and-fire’ restaurants (烟火小店), small, local eateries with warm, homely atmospheres. Compared to last year, participating restaurants saw foot traffic increase by 300% and orders jump by 150%. What’s interesting here is that this tool has emerged as a real strength for small businesses – the types competing with chains, and ones that perhaps haven’t garnered the shine of influencer appeal.
By nailing footfall, they’ve instantly put themselves in the spotlight. Interestingly, the average spend at top-ranked restaurants was just RMB 83 (approx. USD 11) per person, reflecting the platform’s strong appeal among diners seeking quality yet affordable meals.
Amap’s strength is in its algorithm. Unlike traditional review apps, Amap’s rankings rely on verified user behaviour rather than paid promotions or subjective ratings. These metrics are collated into results that really appeal to consumers.
The features are also a good marriage of travel and dining. Users can plan food stops based on route, call taxis, and even sync EV charging stations with restaurant locations to create an integrated consume-as-you-go type experience.
Amap has pulled off a major feat here, but can they make it stick? The viral attention economy is painfully fickle. The lesson here is that consumers are always looking for an authentic experience. Amap found a novel way to provide that. There’s also perhaps something to be said for the changing way we travel. Amap is shifting from a navigation tool to a ‘travel + local consumption’ platform. With that shift comes a challenge to the traditional review-app model. Could the all-alluring ‘authentic experience’ as promised by review apps actually be found in something as cold and unfeeling as objective data?
