China: Using AI for Mass “Reviews” to Drive Traffic Ruled Unfair Competition by Court

On October 28, 2025, the website of the Wuxi Court published a case decision where a company used AI to mass-generate articles reviewing competitors and drive traffic to its own site, ultimately being ruled by the court to have engaged in unfair competition. 
Case Introduction
The plaintiff company is reported to be a high-tech enterprise with a certain fame in the market, and its business “focuses on providing management software for small businesses, offering multiple software products including inventory management software, financial accounting software, and supermarket point-of-sale software.”

The defendant company's business scope also includes software development, sales, and consulting. To optimize promotion, the defendant company established a complete “AI article production line,” with the following specific operations: 1) The defendant company batch-generated long-tail keywords using its products (e.g., inventory management software) as root terms and used them as article titles, such as “How is XX Company's (i.e., the plaintiff, hereinafter the same) inventory management software?” and “How to operate XX Company's inventory management software?” 2) The defendant company used AI tools to automatically generate articles based on these titles. It is reported that these articles introduced and reviewed the plaintiff company's inventory management software. While not defamatory, tens of thousands of such articles were generated. Apart from the plaintiff company, the article titles also implicated numerous other operators within the industry. 3) The defendant company published these articles on its corporate website, embedding various content and links promoting its own products within the article pages.

Accordingly, the plaintiff company filed a lawsuit with the court, asserting that “the said actions diverted potential consumers searching for its products to the defendant company's website, thereby reducing its business opportunities, constituting unfair competition.” The defendant company replied that such “operations were intended to optimize marketing and promotional effectiveness. Although the webpage title and content included the plaintiff company's name, the webpage content merely provided an objective introduction to the plaintiff company's software products. The defendant had no intent to free-ride on the plaintiff company's goodwill and did not cause any harm to the plaintiff company.”

Upon trial, the Court considered that “the law does not prohibit business operators from evaluating others' products or services, and peer evaluations serve as an important means of regulating industry practices. However, any comments or criticisms made by operators regarding others' products, services, or business activities must be objective and truthful. If an operator provides a genuine, fair, and non-defamatory evaluation of another operator based on actual experience—even if their own products are mentioned in the relevant content—the judiciary need not intervene to restrict free competition among operators.”

The Court further considered that, in this case, the defendant company's bulk publication of articles entirely generated by AI constitutes “promotional activities aimed at profiting by mass-releasing articles containing keywords of peer software while embedding its own software within them.” Such conduct redirects users searching for the plaintiff company's or other brands' inventory management software to the defendant's website, thereby reducing user traffic, transaction opportunities, and operational interests of the plaintiff company and other industry peers to a certain extent. Furthermore, the court determined that such actions “introduced a large volume of low-quality information, causing data pollution, increasing the difficulty for consumers to obtain accurate information, and harming societal interests.”In conclusion, the Court determined that the defendant company “violated the principles of honest and credit, as well as the business ethics, and overstepped the boundaries of free competition, constituted unfair competition. The Court ordered the defendant company to cease its unfair competitive practices and compensate the plaintiff company for its losses.”

Comment

This case involves the use of emerging AI technology to mass-produce articles containing others' trademarks and business names, which were then published on its own website, in order to free-ride on others' reputations to drive traffic to their own site. Thus, it violated the provisions on business ethics in the Anti-Unfair Competition Law (2019 Amendment, the same below), which provides that “operators shall adhere to the principles of voluntariness, equality, fairness, and integrity in their production and business activities, and shall comply with laws and business ethics.”

It is worth noting that the term “business ethics” here does not refer to ethical standards in the everyday sense. Article 1 of the Interpretation by the Supreme People's Court of Several Issues Concerning the Application of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law of the People's Republic of China (the “Judicial Interpretation”) stipulates, “Where an operator disrupts the order of market competition, damages the lawful rights and interests of other operators or consumers, and such conduct falls outside the scope of violations covered by Chapter II of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law or provisions of the Patent Law, Trademark Law, Copyright Law, etc., the people's courts may apply Article 2 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law to make a determination.”

Further, Article 3 of the Judicial Interpretation states that “The People's Courts may recognize the generally followed and accepted norms of conduct within specific commercial sectors as the “business ethics” stipulated in Article 2 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. The People's courts shall determine whether an operator has violated business ethics by comprehensively considering factors such as industry rules or commercial practices, the operator's subjective state, the transactional counterpart's choice intent, and the impact on consumer rights, market competition order, and public interest, based on the specific circumstances of each case. When determining whether an operator has violated business ethics, people's courts may refer to professional standards, technical specifications, or self-regulatory agreements established by industry authorities, industry associations, or self-regulatory organizations. ...”

In this case, the defendant company utilized a technology-neutral AI platform to mass-produce and publish “review” articles about the plaintiff company's products and those of its competitors. Although these articles contained no defamatory content regarding the plaintiff's products, the reviews were not based on genuine usage experiences. Their essence was to lure consumers into clicking by embedding competitors' keywords and links to the defendant's own products. In other words, this constitutes “free-riding” to intercept traffic. Such conduct not only misleads consumers but also disrupts normal market competition order, thereby infringing upon the legitimate interests of the plaintiff company as a competitor.

Accordingly, the Court explicitly stated that even if the content of AI-generated articles did not defame others, it exposed potential consumers who originally searched for the plaintiff company to the defendant company's similar products. It constituted “improperly exploiting another party's reputation to obtain business opportunities rightfully belonging to others, thereby causing financial losses to fellow operators.” Furthermore, the Court held that the defendant company's mass production of “review” articles “objectively resulted in traffic diversion and data environment pollution, exceeding the reasonable boundaries of industry oversight and legitimate evaluation while violating the principle of credit and honest. Its tactic of flooding search results disrupted the normal operation of search algorithms, increasing the public's information retrieval costs and reducing choice efficiency. This harmed consumer rights and overall market competition efficiency, constituting a disruption of market competition order.” 

The application and widespread adoption of generative AI platforms no doubt significantly enhances the efficiency of producing marketing and promotional content. However, if misapplied, this high-output technology may not only infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of others but also potentially undermine consumer rights and market competition order due to the proliferation of false and low-quality content. Therefore, the lesson from this case is that enterprises must comply with relevant laws when utilizing generative AI for promotional purposes. Defenses such as “content generated by AI” or “AI technology neutrality” cannot serve as grounds for exempting enterprises from liability for illegal conduct. If such neutral technology is abused by enterprises to intercept others' business opportunities, disrupt competitive order, or engage in other unlawful acts, they will face legal regulation under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law for violating business ethics.