Yelp on Tuesday introduced an AI chatbot aimed at helping people cut through what the company described as an overwhelming volume of user commentary when they search for local businesses. The effort is positioned as an “assistant” for Yelp’s recommendation engine, designed to connect an answer to the review evidence behind it rather than presenting a conclusion without visible sourcing.
Yelp said its chatbot is designed for local searches where users may otherwise wade through large sets of reviews for places such as restaurants, doctors, plumbers, roofers and other merchants. The company said the chatbot will surface recommendations alongside relevant reviews, so users can see the human-written commentary that informed the result.
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the chatbot’s speed comes from its ability to read and interpret large numbers of reviews quickly. He said the chatbot can really understand 500 reviews “in a second,” compared with the way a consumer might only skim a small fraction of comments before deciding.
In explaining how Yelp plans to set its assistant apart, the company contrasted its approach with the broader rise of AI chatbots that summarize information. Yelp said analyzing and explaining large volumes of information in an easily digestible format has already been a feature of tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and other “answer engine” products, but that Yelp believes its chatbot will stand out by showing the reviews that led to its recommendations and conclusions.
Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s chief product officer, said the company’s starting point came from concerns users have about misinformation and fabrications. He said, “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,” adding that Yelp is trying to keep “the human connections” visible while AI handles the “drudgery” of making those connections.
The launch arrives as Yelp navigates a changing traffic landscape shaped by how people search online. The company said it has struggled to overcome a habit of turning to Google instead of staying within Yelp when users are looking for local businesses, and it pointed to past disputes over how Google used access to Yelp’s reviews and how Google’s search features can reduce clicks to outside websites.
Yelp described an earlier licensing relationship with Google that it said ended after Google began summarizing information in ways that gave consumers less reason to click links that led to other sites. The company said the impact has hurt Yelp and other free services that rely heavily on advertising, noting that Yelp depends on Google for more than 70% of its web traffic in the U.S.
Yelp also tied its push into AI to its ongoing antitrust efforts involving Google. The company said it accused Google in the past of improperly raiding its reviews and favoring its own services, prompting an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission that ended in a 2013 settlement that required only limited changes. The company said complaints continued and contributed to a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit that culminated in a 2024 decision finding Google an illegal monopoly, and it said a federal judge later rebuffed the government’s request to break up Google, ordering less drastic changes.
Yelp said it is pursuing its own antitrust lawsuit against Google, with a May 2028 trial scheduled. The company also said it is trying to diversify its revenue, including licensing some data to OpenAI for potential use in ChatGPT while betting that emphasizing human connections in local recommendations will bring more traffic back to its service.
In a statement about the expected user experience, Stoppelman said, “With this new technology, we really think you are going to be able to find that needle in a haystack and have a far more personalized experience.”