Yelp introduces an AI chatbot to help users sift local recommendations
[April 21, 2026] By
MICHAEL LIEDTKE
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Online review aggregator Yelp wants to harness
artificial intelligence to make it easier for users to find information
curated by other people.
Although Yelp’s users have always been able to dive into its reservoir
of 330 million local business reviews, they sometimes find themselves
drowning in a sea of commentary from other people about restaurants,
doctors, plumbers, roofers and a smorgasbord of other merchants — a
problem the new chatbot assistant is designed to solve.
For instance, if a user asks Yelp's new assistant for a good place to
get coffee with a dog, the app will show recommendations alongside
relevant reviews.
“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.
Analyzing and explaining vast amounts of information in an easily
digestible summary is something that other leading chatbots such as
OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity's answer engine and
Google's AI overviews already have been doing.
Yelp believes its chatbot will stand out by pointing to the reviews that
led to its recommendations and conclusions. The San Francisco-based
company decided to create an AI chatbot that shows the evidence
underlying its findings, after a survey found that most consumers worry
the technology provides misinformation or fabrications.
“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.”
Yelp has been looking for a spark during an AI boom that has more than
doubled the value of the tech-driven Nasdaq composite index while its
stock price is stuck at roughly the same level as the end of 2022,
shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT.
Although Yelp business reviews have always been popular among consumers
looking for recommendations about places to eat and shop, the company
hasn't been able to overcome people's almost reflexive habit of turning
to Google when they're searching for almost anything.
Google was already synonymous with search by the time Stoppelman and
Russel Simmons launched Yelp in 2004, but its results about local
businesses often were either inadequate or inaccurate.
[to top of second column] |
A Yelp logo is shown on a tablet at the company's office, in San
Francisco, Feb. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
 To help fill the void, Google signed
a two-year licensing agreement to gain access to Yelp's reviews. But
the partnership fell apart when Google began to summarize various
information about various topics — including restaurant
recommendations in a particular neighborhood — in a way that gave
consumers less reason to click on links that sent them to other
sites.
That phenomenon has hurt Yelp and other free online services that
make most of their money from advertising; Yelp depends on Google
for more than 70% of its web traffic in the U.S.
The tensions came to head when Yelp accused Google of improperly
raiding its business reviews and favoring its own services. Those
allegations helped trigger a investigation by the Federal Trade
Commission that ended with a 2013 settlement that only required
Google to make a few relatively minor changes.
But the complaints about Google's tactics didn't stop, triggering a
U.S. Justice Department lawsuit that culminated in a 2024 decision
condemning the search engine as an illegal monopoly. But a federal
judge last year rebuffed the government's request to break up
Google, and instead ordered less drastic changes — a decision that
was shaped by the way more people now rely on chatbots to inform
them instead of search engines.
Yelp is pursuing its own antitrust lawsuit against Google in a case
scheduled for a May 2028 trial.
As part of its effort to diversify and increase its annual revenue
of $1.5 billon, Yelp already is licensing some of its data to OpenAI
for potential usage in ChatGPT while betting that its chatbot's
emphasis on connecting people will still reel in more traffic to its
service.
“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,” Stoppelman said.
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved
 |
