Yelp is betting on an AI-powered chatbot to revitalize its position in local business search, unveiling a new assistant that summarizes reviews and helps users book services directly within the app — a direct challenge to Google’s dominance in the local search market that has long overshadowed the San Francisco-based review platform.
The company says its chatbot can analyze 500 reviews in a second and provide tailored recommendations with source links. For example, a user asking for a dog-friendly coffee shop would receive recommendations alongside the specific reviews that support them, rather than a simple list of results.
“This chatbot can really understand 500 reviews in a second whereas a consumer might say, ‘Well, I read the first five reviews, so I guess that’s good enough,'” said Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, who co-founded the company 22 years ago.
The chatbot also integrates with several third-party platforms, allowing users to place food orders through DoorDash and Grubhub, book beauty appointments via Vagaro, schedule doctor visits through ZocDoc, and arrange car repairs through RepairPal — all within the AI assistant. The integration marks a significant step toward making Yelp a one-stop platform for local services.
The push comes at a critical time for Yelp. The company’s stock has stagnated near 2022 levels while the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite has more than doubled during the AI boom. Yelp depends on Google for more than 70% of its web traffic in the U.S., a vulnerability highlighted by a 2024 federal court decision that found Google to be an illegal monopoly in search.
Yelp is pursuing its own antitrust lawsuit against Google, scheduled for trial in May 2028, alleging the search giant improperly raided its business reviews and favored its own services. The company has also begun licensing some of its data to OpenAI for potential use in ChatGPT.
“People want AI chatbots to be transparent about where they are getting the data from, they want to see the reviews alongside the results when they’re doing local search,” said Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s chief product officer. “So we are trying to make sure the human connections stay front and center while AI handles all the drudgery of making those connections.”
For Yelp, the stakes are high. The company’s annual revenue of $1.5 billion has barely budged in recent years, and the AI transformation represents both a threat — if Google and chatbots divert more traffic away — and an opportunity to differentiate by leaning into the transparency and human expertise that Yelp’s review database provides. Whether the chatbot strategy succeeds may determine the company’s trajectory in an increasingly AI-driven search landscape.
