Your Yelp page can now feed what ChatGPT says about you
Most owners have not opened their Yelp page in years. It just became one of the sources ChatGPT can read when a customer asks about you.
Co-Founder, Vyzz
What Yelp handed to OpenAI in July
In July, Yelp agreed to let OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, use its reviews, ratings, photos and business details. Axios reported it first and Search Engine Land covered it the same day. For an owner, that means a customer asking ChatGPT about a business like yours can get part of the answer off your Yelp page.
Nothing changed inside your Yelp account, and the page picked up a second job anyway.
Four limits before you act on any of it. Some of the coverage around this got loose.
OpenAI got no exclusive right to the content. Yelp already shares this kind of data with Yahoo and Apple Maps, and the agreement leaves it free to sign other AI companies later. Search Engine Land's report says so plainly.
Neither company said what the money was. Terms were never disclosed, so any figure you see quoted is a guess.
Yelp doesn't decide how your content shows up. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told Axios that Yelp branding and a link will appear wherever OpenAI uses the content, and that OpenAI controls how that experience looks. Your reviews can be framed in a way nobody at your business approved.
Last one. Yelp says its Request a Quote tool, which lets a customer ask a business for a price without picking up the phone, is coming to ChatGPT for people looking to hire someone nearby. That has been announced. Nobody has confirmed it's live, so don't plan around it.
Why the page matters more this year than last
BrightLocal surveyed 1,002 US adults for its 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey. 45% said they had used an AI tool to find a local business in the past 12 months, up from 6% the year before. Among the 455 people who did, ChatGPT was the most common tool at 31%, and Google AI Mode came second at 23%.
That puts AI third among the ways Americans look for a business nearby, behind Google and Facebook. Use of Google reviews for the same job slipped from 83% to 71% in one year. BrightLocal published the report in March and updated it in April.
88% of the people who ask an AI for a business nearby go and check the reviews the AI cites. Getting named is the start of the decision. What the customer reads next settles it.
So the job this week is small. Find out what your Yelp page says, and ask whether a stranger would book off it.
What your page probably says right now
Take a medspa. I spent an afternoon this week reading medspa Yelp pages the way a customer would, and the same few things kept turning up. A woman in her thirties wants lip filler and has no interest in calling four places to compare. She asks ChatGPT which practices near her do it well and what it runs. Some of what ChatGPT tells her about you can come from a Yelp page you have not opened since the day you claimed it. Maybe you never claimed it, because a customer set it up years ago and you left it alone.
Go read that page the way she would. Search your business name plus the word Yelp, or go to biz.yelp.com and look yourself up. Then start at the top and work down.
The address and the hours come first. Medspas move suites, change their Saturday hours and add a second location, and the old details sit on Yelp for years afterward. A customer who drives to the wrong door doesn't call you to sort it out.
Then the photos. Plenty of medspa pages still lead with a shot from opening week, which may be older than the new laser, the remodel, or half the current staff. A photo that looks nothing like the room a patient walks into reads as neglect.
Then the services and the prices. If the page lists three treatments and you now do eleven, three is all there is for ChatGPT to find.
The same page, a home services version
Home services runs into a rougher version of this. An HVAC company or a plumber often has a Yelp page nobody at the business ever made. A customer created it years ago to leave a review, and it has been collecting more of them ever since. The phone number on it may be the old office line. The towns it lists may be ones you stopped covering two summers back.
An unclaimed page is the one worth fixing first, because you can't correct anything on it until you claim it. Claiming is free on Yelp and never turns you into a Yelp advertiser. It gives you edit rights on the business details and a set of free tools.
Once you can edit, read the reviews as a customer would. A three-star review from 2022 about a missed appointment window still shapes the impression, especially if nobody ever replied to it. A reply that names what happened and what changed since does more for the next reader than a stack of five-star ratings with no words in them.
When an AI names you and cites Yelp, those reviews are what the customer reads next.
The 30 minutes to spend this week
- Find the page. Search your business name plus Yelp, or look yourself up at biz.yelp.com. If two pages come up for you, note both, because duplicates are common.
- Check whether it is claimed. Yelp can mark a page unclaimed again after a long stretch of owner inactivity, so a page you claimed in 2019 may not read as claimed today.
- Claim it if nobody has. Claiming costs nothing and never enrolls you in ads.
- Fix the facts in this order: address, hours, phone, service list, prices. Those are what a customer asks an assistant about most.
- Replace any photo older than 18 months.
- Answer the three worst reviews by name, saying what happened and what has changed since.
That is one sitting. Put it on a Tuesday morning before the schedule fills up.
Two limits on all of this, stated plainly. The evidence that a cleaner Yelp page changes what ChatGPT says about your business does not exist yet, as a published study or as a measurement of my own. How heavily ChatGPT weighs Yelp content against everything else it reads is also unreported. Both of those are open questions. The content is available to ChatGPT now, and close to half of consumers are asking. Half an hour is a fair price for that.