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The Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard Himawari-8, a next-generation geostationary meteorological satellite, provided firstly the full-disk aerosol observations every 10 min at sub-kilometer spatial resolution(5 km). This is responsible for retrieving the ground-level particulate matter of fewer than 2.5 micrometers and improving assimilation model. However, the representativeness of AHI L3 hourly Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) products remains unclear under different air quality conditions, Especially, over frequently polluted urban areas that feature complex surface characteristics and aerosol models. In this study, One-to-one comprehensive comparisons were conducted to evaluate the performance of three types of AHI L3 AOT products (version 3.0) based on the Aerosol Robotic NETwork (AERONET) aerosol measurements over Beijing. The overall comparisons of AHI and ground AOTs show the AHI merged AOT perform best, which the R is 0.87, RMSE is 0.25 and 52.5% of retrievals fall within the envelope of Expect Error (EE, ±(0.05 + 0.2 * AOTground)). For the different primary pollutants, the results suggested the three types AHI hourly AOT products are more suitable for the fine particulate matters (PM2.5) retrievals, especially the merged AOT with 0.87 of R, 0.29 of RMSE and 58.8% of within EE. Furthermore, when the slight and moderate pollution happened over Beijing, the AHI hourly AOT products perform well. And when the heavy pollution happened, the performance of the AHI merge AOT and L2 mean AOT is better. a case during low to high pollution suggested that AHI merged AOT can capture the similar spatial pattern to the MODIS (Deep Blue) DB or (Dark Target) DTDB merged AOT and has good consistency with ground-based air quality monitoring. These results demonstrate the AHI hourly merged AOT is a promising aerosol retrieval for air quality.