When Alyssa Gangeri was running restaurants in New York more than a decade ago, Yelp was the bane of her existence, she says. She would regularly go down a rabbit hole, reading her restaurant’s reviews and scouring them for clues about when the diners had visited or who had served them.
Both Gangeri and Yelp have evolved. Yelp has expanded beyond being a hub for reviews of local businesses into offering tools for those businesses. And today, Gangeri uses the company’s products to help run The Butter Milk Ranch, her popular pastry and brunch spot in Nashville.
The company that used to “break her soul” with each negative review is now responsible for monitoring Gangeri’s bustling waitlist, helping staff figure out when and where to seat diners, and storing notes and data on guests. Yelp even answers Butter Milk Ranch’s phones. Through its AI-powered Yelp Host product, Yelp assists diners who have questions about the restaurant or are looking to get on the waitlist.
Now, Yelp Host is expanding. The company announced today that the service can handle conversational food ordering, connecting directly to a restaurant’s point-of-sale system—like Toast or Square—to place orders and conduct transactions seamlessly. It also comes with extended customizations (including new voices and accents), the ability to respond and communicate in 17 languages, and reporting tools, so restaurants can evaluate metrics like after-hours call volume and reservation conversion rates. Finally, Yelp Host is integrating with OpenTable. If a restaurant uses OpenTable to manage its dining room, the Yelp Host AI can answer the phone, check OpenTable’s live availability, and book the table into the OpenTable system without human intervention.
Yelp has been supplying restaurants with technology to run their operations for more than a decade, beginning with reservations and waitlists. But the B2B side of the business has taken on more importance in the last few years as the company’s traditional revenue engine, advertising, sees its growth slow to a near halt.
Yelp’s net revenue increased by just 1% year over year to $361 million in the first quarter of 2026. This follows a 4% year-over-year rise in 2025 revenue, which reached $1.46 billion. The company has been hit especially hard by decreased advertising among restaurants, as they respond to diners pulling back on discretionary spending. Yelp’s advertising from restaurants, retailers, and other such businesses dropped 11% last quarter, after falling 6% last year. Small business advertising is a “very challenging market,” says Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Baird, an asset management firm, who covers Yelp.
In response, Yelp has been leaning into business services, which extend beyond restaurants to include appointment and quote-request features for service providers like plumbers and beauticians. Many of them are powered by AI, including Hatch, a customer communication platform for contractors that Yelp acquired for $270 million earlier this year. Yelp is targeting an annualized figure of $250 million in revenue for these combined “other services” by the end of 2028, more than double the comparable figure for 2026.
“Businesses will start seeing Yelp in a new light,” says Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman. “It’s this incredible review site, but it also provides these powerful AI tools that are essential to my business.”
The goal, he says, “is “to expand the concept of Yelp in the AI era.” Restaurants are an obvious place to focus.
AI on the Line
Yelp Host, introduced in October, is a large part of the company’s AI story. The service, which helps diners answer questions about restaurants and make reservations, has answered more than 1 million phone calls since its launch, the company says.
“Picking up the phone is a real challenge [for restaurants]. It obviously takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money, and especially if you’re a busy business owner, you don’t want to be on the phone,” Stoppelman says. “You want a solution that provides a great experience, is robust, and can capture all the business opportunity that comes at you.”
But in an industry known for hospitality, there’s been some reluctance from restaurants and diners to turn the human touch over to AI. Recently, larger chains like Starbucks and McDonald’s have walked back some of their AI initiatives. And smaller restaurants that have used AI to create promotional materials have received backlash.
Gangeri, however, argues that missing calls or being unable to hear a caller over the noise of the dining room is a far worse form of hospitality than having “Michael,” the name she gave to her Yelp Host, answer questions or help diners get on a waitlist.
Yelp Host does what AI should do, she said. “It doesn’t make our lives easier,” she says. “It makes our lives more efficient, and it’s monitored.”
Frenemies and Partners
There are plenty of competitors vying for a chance to make restaurant operators’ lives more efficient, including dozens of companies alone that offer AI-powered phone-answering services for restaurants. With its announcement today, Yelp became one of more than 20 AI voice partners to integrate with OpenTable.
Historically, Yelp and OpenTable have been fierce competitors in the reservation space. This partnership bridges that gap, and helps streamline technology for restaurants. “Our strategy is to integrate wherever possible, starting with the market leaders,” says Cliff Cate, VP and general manager of restaurants at Yelp.
Yelp, which has 28 million monthly mobile app users, has a built-in advantage when it comes to selling restaurant tech: There are more than 8.4 million active claimed businesses on Yelp, and restaurants are the second most popularly reviewed category. Restaurants, in other words, are already on the platform, sometimes by necessity.
Even businesses that are skeptical of Yelp know they need to update their opening hours, answer questions from diners, and respond to reviews. And a robust profile on Yelp may become even more important to restaurants as diners turn to chatbots for recommendations. Yelp and OpenAI have formed a licensing agreement that brings Yelp data directly to ChatGPT.
That data is also utilized by Yelp Host. “Your hours, your cuisine type, your menu—all of this is already native within Yelp,” Cate says. “We’ve spent 20 years developing all this rich content about restaurants and being the trusted source for consumers. And now that’s become a great knowledge base that restaurants can use to get started with AI.”
Yelp is on its way to becoming a “closed loop” for restaurants, says Sebastian from Baird, beginning with “initial search and discovery, all the way through to making a reservation or placing an order.”
Yelp Host’s new AI-powered food ordering function dramatically expands its appeal. “With the food ordering functionality that we announced, we’re starting to see a really fast adoption of restaurants that are fast casual or simple burger places, pizza places, wing places that have a tremendous amount of call volume for food ordering,” Cate says.
New product capabilities, combined with the company’s unique data, might just make Yelp appealing to even the most skeptical of restaurants. And the company has been taking steps to win them over, filtering out unreliable reviews, AI-written reviews, or those not based on firsthand experiences. More than 190,000 reviews were reported and removed in 2025.
“Being the source of truth for restaurant information for consumers,” Cate says, “has allowed us to develop this big source of information for restaurants.” And in the age of AI, Yelp is using that information in increasingly interesting ways.