Alibaba Already Merged AI Search Ads With Organic

Alibaba.com has already done the thing the Western AI-search industry keeps telling you cannot be done. It did it quietly, and it is running at more than 700,000 buyers a day.

The thing is merging paid and unpaid results inside an AI-generated answer. Read anything published this year on advertising in AI search and you will find the separation principle carrying all the structural load. OpenAI's sponsored slots sit below the response and carry a label. Perplexity has stated publicly that advertisers do not influence answer content. GEO vendors write, in bold, that citations are earned and cannot be bought. The entire body of paid-AI-search advice -- earn your way in first, buy placement around the edges afterwards -- depends on that wall staying up.

There is no wall on Alibaba.com. I spent two days in the platform's official seller training in late July, and it is not that the separation was dismantled after some scandal. It was never built.

## One ranking, weighted toward whoever paid

Alibaba's own description, in material handed to sellers, is that advertised and unadvertised products are mixed into a single ordering and that advertised products carry additional weighting inside it. Not a sponsored block above the results. Not a labelled card beneath them. The ad is a position in the list and it looks exactly like the position next to it.

Products from brand advertisers receive priority ordering once they clear a relevance bar. I am not going to pretend that condition is meaningless -- this is not an auction buying its way past relevance. It is a tiebreak running in favour of whoever paid, among products that already qualify. Which, if you have been doing this a while, is precisely how paid search worked before anyone thought to describe it as a wall.

What that leaves for a seller who does not pay was put more plainly in the room than on any slide. Asked whether search ordering follows rules, the trainer said the two premium fixed positions are the only deterministic ones and everything else is not, and that a new seller running no paid promotion will not break onto the first page, because the first page belongs to accounts that have been there seven or eight years. The front rows, in the platform's own phrasing, are essentially all ad slots.

## And then there is the query itself

Alibaba has a qualification-gated feature that attaches an advertiser's brand term to the category's head term inside the buyer's own query, before the buyer has finished forming it. Qualification is share of category audience, somewhere around the top tenth.

Sit with that for a moment. The channel is not only selling positions in the answer. It is selling a small edit to the question.

The limits, stated so nobody has to point them out: this is described in seller material as rolling out rather than fully shipped, and the thresholds move. I read documents written for sellers, not ranking code. But the direction is not ambiguous, and nobody inside Alibaba is pretending the wall exists.

## What earns the slot when you have not paid

The other half of the training is the most specific public account of AI-search ranking mechanics I have found from any platform in any language, and it is more useful than the entire GEO literature.

Alibaba's deep search is on by default. Buyers no longer type keywords, they type sentences, and the platform puts buyer query length up about 12% year on year. The system parses the sentence into discrete requirements, then bands the results by how many of them each product satisfies.

The worked example in the material is a container-house query long enough to carry six separable requirements. Six intent points get resolved, and results are ordered by match count -- everything at six of six, then five of six, then downward.

That is not keyword coverage with extra steps. Under keyword matching, a partial match still competes on the same surface as a full one. Under intent-point banding, a product satisfying five of six requirements sits in a band beneath one satisfying all six, no matter how good those five are.

The sharpest consequence: where a buyer's query constrains supplier attributes -- the example given was a factory with more than a hundred employees -- accounts that left the employee-count field empty are excluded, not demoted. An empty field is not a weak signal. It is a failed filter. Alibaba's instruction to sellers was to fill it in even if the honest answer is three people.

## The part that should actually bother you

Alibaba's trainers tell sellers directly to keep transactions on the platform, and the reason given is not loyalty. Off-platform deals produce no visible exposure and no visible inquiries, which means less traffic allocated to you later. Separately, sellers lose penalty points for asking a buyer for an email address or a WhatsApp number.

So the same channel selling the unpaid half of the results page also penalises you for building the one relationship that would outlive it. Nothing conspiratorial in that. It is a coherent, well-run business model, and if I owned a marketplace I would probably run it the same way. It does mean the cost of the channel is not the ad spend, and it means the word organic on a marketplace is marketing copy rather than a category you can plan around. The same seller material also exposes [why the smallest ad budget is the worst place to enter](/blog/minimum-viable-ad-spend).

Two things to take from it. Separation in Western AI search is a norm, not a technical constraint. It is being defended on trust grounds right now, and a merged ranking is obviously buildable because it is already built and serving 700,000 buyers a day. Betting an acquisition plan on AI answers staying unbuyable is betting on somebody's restraint.

And the intent-point mechanism is the clearest instruction anyone has published on what structuring data for AI actually means. Not be clear, not add schema. Enumerate every constraint a buyer could put into a sentence, and make sure each one has a field with a value in it. A blank field costs you the whole query, not a few positions.

I sell electrical distribution equipment into Africa and the Middle East from an Alibaba.com account, and I also run cold email off domains I own, where [the pipeline yield is measurable](/blog/ai-outbound-pipeline-yield) and [a second attempt at the same list costs almost nothing](/blog/cold-email-second-pass-cost). Nobody there gets to reweight me. That is a preference with a bias attached. The mechanics above are not.