Exclusive: Yelp partners with ChatGPT to surface reviews
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Yelp is licensing reviews, photos and other business information to OpenAI, giving ChatGPT a new source of real-time local recommendation data, the company tells Axios exclusively.
Why it matters: The partnership is an acknowledgment that chatbots are increasingly taking market share from traditional search as consumers turn to AI models for everyday queries.
Zoom in: ChatGPT will surface Yelp reviews, ratings, photos and other business details as part of responses to user queries.
- Yelp's branding and links will appear when OpenAI uses its content, though OpenAI controls the design of that experience, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told Axios.
- Yelp's "Request a Quote" feature will also be added soon, allowing ChatGPT users to contact local service providers for quotes directly through the large language model.
- The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal, which does not preclude Yelp from making similar deals with other AI companies.
What they're saying: "If you want to answer local queries, you really need Yelp," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told Axios, arguing that the company's breadth of reviews gives it an advantage AI companies are willing to pay for.
- Yelp already supplies data to other search platforms like Yahoo+ and Apple Maps.
- The OpenAI deal extends that distribution strategy into generative AI, where Yelp is betting that its database of human reviews will become even more valuable as AI generated content makes up an increasing portion of the internet.
Zoom out: Companies built on proprietary data are all wrestling with the same question: Is it better to get inside ChatGPT or compete against it?
- Yelp's answer is to treat ChatGPT the way it previously treated Apple Maps or Alexa, as just another distribution platform.
- Reddit has taken a similar approach, monetizing its data through a deal with OpenAI, though its licensing agreement with Google may be on thin ice, per the Wall Street Journal.
- Many news publishers — including Axios — have done the same, while others, including the New York Times, have gone to court instead in an effort to protect their data from LLMs.
OpenAI understands that deals like this keep their chatbots full of information that's actually useful to people, instead of bloating responses with hallucinated or narrow results.
Yes, but: Yelp has seen this movie before and it didn't like the ending.
- Yelp once licensed content to Google before the relationship deteriorated into years of conflict over Google's local-search practices. Yelp is now suing Google, alleging the company unfairly favored its own local results.
- Stoppelman argues that the exposure still benefits the company by reinforcing its brand: "Ultimately, we believe that if we allow our content outside the walls of just Yelp, and we provide it in useful ways to consumers … value does accrue back to Yelp," he said.
The bottom line: As AI becomes a new front door to the internet, content companies are deciding whether to partner with that ecosystem or compete with it.
Disclosure: Axios and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access part of Axios' story archives while helping fund the launch of Axios into several local cities and providing some AI tools. Axios has editorial independence.
