All medical consultations, medication purchases, and medical examinations ultimately revolve around “payment” and “medical insurance”. Ant Afu is inherently integrated into transactional processes. When users check their medical insurance balance on Alipay, Afu can effortlessly interpret medical insurance policies. After users complete hair tests, Afu can directly recommend nearby medical insurance-designated pharmacies and even instantly generate medication orders.

By Wan Fu

In the winter of 2025, China's Internet healthcare sector is experiencing a significant transformation.

As an increasing number of users habitually turn to Alipay to consult with an AI agent named “Ant Afu” for hair loss photos, interpret medical reports, and directly complete registration and medical insurance payments, Baidu Health, the former industry leader, finds itself pushed to the brink.

This is a tale of a “dimensionality reduction strike”. While Ant Group builds a new paradigm of “service finding people” based on its payment infrastructure and AI large models, Baidu Health, stuck in its increasingly barren search box, loses its hold on defining the medical and health sector amid encirclement from JD.com, Tencent, ByteDance, and Ant Group.

The more formidable Ant Afu becomes, the more pale and desolate Baidu Health's situation appears. The traffic distribution logic of the Web 2.0 era is crumbling in the face of the Web 3.0 AI Agent era.

Ant Afu: More Than Just AI

“Ant Afu” is the personified collective term for Ant Group's AI medical service agent matrix, developed through its proprietary “Bailing” large model and integrated with Alipay's extensive medical service ecosystem. It completely abandons the old logic of “providing information” and instead “provides solutions”.

Recently, Ant Afu's “AI Hair Detection” feature, which has sparked heated discussions on social media, showcases its technological prowess. Users simply upload a photo of their scalp, and the AI, trained on massive clinical data, accurately identifies hair loss severity and provides medical advice.

This multimodal (visual + textual) perception capability positions Ant Afu as a basic (junior) “triage doctor”. Unlike traditional search engines that bombard users with thousands of unverified web links, Ant Afu delivers a judgment based on image data—a certainty that is the most scarce resource in medical scenarios.

“Anzhen'er”, launched in regions like Zhejiang, is another ace up Ant Afu's sleeve for B-end services. It integrates with hospital HIS (Hospital Information Systems) to provide patients with end-to-end companionship services, from in-hospital navigation and queue reminders to report interpretation. This “capillary-level” service capability constructs a formidable technological barrier.

Ant Afu's core strength lies in its support from the Alipay ecosystem.

In the medical chain, all consultations, medication purchases, and medical examinations ultimately hinge on “payment” and “medical insurance”. Ant Afu is inherently embedded in transactional processes. When users check their medical insurance balance on Alipay, Afu can seamlessly interpret medical insurance policies. After users complete hair tests, Afu can directly recommend nearby medical insurance-designated pharmacies and even instantly generate medication orders.

This ecological closed loop of “diagnosis-advice-payment-fulfillment” is unmatched by any pure information platform. It transforms medical services from low-frequency “search” behavior into high-frequency “lifestyle service” behavior. Ant Afu doesn't wait for users to search; instead, it proactively delivers medical services whenever users open Alipay for tasks.

Its positioning resembles an executive “medical commando” rather than a mere “library administrator” who recites information.

Baidu Health's Traffic Depletion and Encirclement

Once, the first reaction for Chinese people feeling unwell was to “Baidu it”. Baidu Health built a vast commercial empire by leveraging “Baidu Search” as a traffic gateway, using pay-per-click rankings, content distribution, and doctor Q&A. However, in 2025, the foundations of this empire—its “traffic pool” and “trust chain”—are being dismantled by competitors.

Douyin and Kuaishou have intercepted massive medical science popularization traffic. Doctor influencers answer patient questions in live streams and guide them to private conversions. Xiaohongshu has become the “medical encyclopedia” for young female users, filled with vivid user notes ranging from cosmetic medicine guides to wellness tips.

With upstream traffic divided by content platforms, Baidu Health's “search-distribution” logic has become a dried-up well. Although Baidu has attempted to reconstruct search with “Wenxin Yiyan”, its current AI search remains stuck at “information aggregation”, far from Ant Afu's closed-loop solutions for registration and payment. Baidu's AI appears overly “liberal arts-oriented”, struggling to form closures in medical decision-making and execution.

Beyond traffic depletion, competitors' service-side deployments have cornered Baidu Health. After the Wei Zexi incident, users still need to expend significant effort discerning ads from genuine science popularization when searching for medical information on Baidu. This trust cost is fatal in the AI era.

In contrast, competitors attack Baidu's weaknesses with their strengths. Ant Afu leverages Alipay's real-name authentication system and Zhima Credit to resolve trust issues between doctors and patients. Doctors are more willing to trust real-name patients referred by Alipay, and patients dare to make payment decisions on Alipay. Tencent Health relies on WeChat's social network and electronic health cards to dominate high-frequency social and follow-up visit entry points. In the battle for public hospital appointment slots, Ant and Tencent, deeply integrated with medical insurance and payments, are clearly preferred by hospitals over Baidu, which relies solely on traffic.

For consumer medical services like medication and devices, JD Health builds high fulfillment barriers with its supply chain logistics, while Ali Health leverages Taobao and Tmall's e-commerce ecosystem. Although Baidu Health operates e-commerce, it lags far behind in logistics speed, after-sales support, and user mindshare.

Ant Afu's emergence completes the final piece of the anti-Baidu alliance—intelligent services. Now, Douyin dominates science popularization, Xiaohongshu excels in “grass-planting” (product recommendations), Alipay/WeChat handle registration and tasks, and JD/Meituan manage medication purchases. Baidu Health's once-proud “traffic + content + service” closed loop has been shattered, leaving only an increasingly marginalized search box.

Business decline is directly reflected in capital market expectations. In 2021, rumors circulated that Baidu Health sought independent financing or even an IPO, with valuations once reaching $30 billion. Today, financing news has vanished, and an IPO seems distant.

Investors recognize a fundamental shift in Internet healthcare's underlying logic: from Web 2.0's “traffic monetization” to Web 3.0's “service delivery”. Under traffic monetization, Baidu reigned supreme by controlling distribution. But in service delivery, Baidu lacks leverage—no payment infrastructure, no logistics network, no social graph, and even its AI applications feel detached due to the absence of transactional scenarios.

Ant Afu demonstrates AI's practical productivity in triage, report interpretation, and auxiliary diagnosis—exactly the AI Native applications capital chases. Baidu Health, by contrast, mainly uses AI to optimize ad click-through rates, essentially still selling traffic—an improvement of the old era, not a revolution of the new.

Technological iterations often occur abruptly, not linearly. Nokia didn't fall because it couldn't make durable phones but because smartphones transformed human-computer interaction. Similarly, Baidu Health's crisis stems not from declining search technology but from changing user behaviors in accessing medical services.

The future of Internet healthcare belongs to platforms with closed-loop services, authentic data, and payment capabilities. In these core dimensions, Baidu Health's cards are dwindling.