Yelp is licensing its reviews to ChatGPT. The local data I read in July was all Google.

Yelp is licensing its reviews, ratings, photos and business details to OpenAI. Axios reported it on 23 July. Yelp’s name and links will show up in ChatGPT answers, OpenAI decides how that looks, and the deal isn’t exclusive, so Yelp can sell the same thing to Perplexity or Google later.

I read ChatGPT’s local traffic on 4 July for the Part 2 teardown. Every business it returned had a Google Place ID on it. So Yelp is selling into a slot that was already full of Google’s data.

Local works differently to the rest of ChatGPT.

Normal web results arrive from vendors it calls bright, labrador, oxylabs and serp. Businesses arrive from a separate system, and mine came back as b1 and serp, with a Google ChIJ… ID on every one.

I asked which pharmacies near me were open. It returned 28 businesses.

Each had a review count, a rating out of 5, categories, an address, coordinates, the distance in metres, and whether it was open at that moment.

The review counts were real, from 422 down to 4.

Some fields came back empty, which is the more useful half. ranking_score and rank were both null, in the local query and again in a second query that drew a map. ChatGPT sorts that list somewhere I can’t see. If anyone tells you they know how it ranks local businesses, they don’t.

review_highlights was empty too. That field holds review text, and review text is what Yelp sells. If this deal works the way I’d expect, a new provider name turns up next to b1 and that field starts filling.

If you want to test this yourself, 2 things.

The local pipeline only runs on “near me”. Ask for coffee “in Dubai” and you get a normal web search with a map on top, which behaves differently. And your browser never sends your location. It sends a timezone. ChatGPT still knew my neighbourhood, so it works the rest out at their end, probably from my IP. I didn’t see that happen, so I’m not stating it as fact.

For local businesses, nothing has changed yet. Every field ChatGPT actually uses comes from your Google Business Profile, so that’s still the thing to work on. Yelp gives you a second one, if Yelp is used where you are. All my testing is from Dubai, where it barely is. This is a US story.

If Yelp is used in your market, set the page up now, before the data goes live. Then get reviews on it. Review count and rating are 2 of the fields ChatGPT actually carries, so a business with no reviews has nothing to fill them with.

The ranking field was null, so I can’t say reviews rank you. But with no reviews you’re not in the data at all, which is the worse problem.

Answer your bad reviews too, and not for the usual reason. If review_highlights fills up, an LLM reads your reviews and puts them into its answer in its own words.

An unanswered complaint that’s well written becomes a sentence in someone’s search result.

One more part of this deal, and it has nothing to do with reviews. Yelp’s “Request a Quote” is going into ChatGPT too, so someone can contact a local plumber without leaving the chat. That takes the enquiry off your website.

I’ll run the capture again and see whether a new provider name shows up. Until it does, nothing has changed in the traffic. Anything that moves goes in the ChatGPT research tracker.

Read off a logged-in ChatGPT Plus account in Dubai on 4 July 2026. Just 1 local query and 1 map query, so the fields are solid and the numbers are only a sample.