Yelp adds AI-powered search and booking for local services

You can now book haircuts, doctors’ appointments, and food deliveries through Yelp.

The business search and review platform has rolled out integrations with providers including DoorDash, Zocdoc, and Vagaro, letting users book appointments and order food directly from a Yelp listing or through the AI-powered Yelp Assistant. Users could already request quotes from businesses ranging from home and auto repair professionals to beauty experts.

The Yelp Assistant is also getting its own tab in the app, as the company aims to become a destination not just for its hundreds of millions of user-contributed reviews but for answering questions about local businesses and booking their services.

“We would like consumers to reconceive Yelp not just as a place where they read reviews,” says Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, SVP of product, “but as a place where they can actually find answers and complete their actions.” 

In a demo for Fast Company, Kuduvalli showed how the Yelp Assistant can locate specific businesses and other places that meet user needs, like a park suitable for walking a dog off-leash or a restaurant fit for date night. The assistant returns a list similar to Yelp’s standard search results, but adds a brief explanation of why each result matches the query, highlighting relevant details from reviews and, in some cases, company websites. It can also handle follow-up questions, such as parking at a dog park or vegetarian options at a restaurant, pulling in details from reviews and photos.

“What’s particularly interesting to a consumer about it is the fact that every answer has a narrative,” Kuduvalli says. “The narration brings a sense of transparency, and it also gives the user confidence as to why they’re seeing what they’re seeing, and it gets them excited.”  

Yelp saw net revenue rise 4% year-over-year last year to a record $1.46 billion, with net income of $146 million, the company said in February regulatory filings. Advertising from services businesses makes up the bulk of Yelp’s revenue, bringing in $948 million last year compared to $444 million for Yelp’s “restaurants, retail & other” category.  

But as Yelp faces new forms of competition with some consumers increasingly turning to AI for questions about home repair projects or where to get a quick meal—or following the advice of influencers on TikTok and Instagram—the company is betting that its wealth of information from reviews and businesses themselves will continue to make it a trusted destination. 

Yelp points to a recent survey it conducted with Morning Consult: while 65% of Americans have used AI search tools in the last six months, just over half say those tools can feel like a “walled garden” that makes results hard to verify. About 63% say they double-check AI answers with other sources, including review platforms and news sites. That matters especially for local businesses, Kuduvalli says, where users want confidence that hours and services are up to date.

In theory, then, the Yelp Assistant can offer the best of both worlds, using AI to answer questions and provide citations and photos from Yelp reviews to back their claims. And once people find a business they like, they’ll increasingly be able to reserve a table or book an appointment directly from Yelp. Integrations with Vagaro and Zocdoc are already live on iOS, and the company plans to make them available through Android and desktop versions of its platform later this year, along with a Calendly integration for businesses that take appointments through that scheduling tool. 

Yelp can even provide cited information as users look at menus in restaurants. A Menu Vision feature that debuted in October can pop up dish photos, highlight popular items, and link to reviews when diners scan menus through the Yelp app. Yelp has continued to enhance Menu Vision since its launch, Kuduvalli says.  

“It will identify far more dishes than it did before,” he says. 

Yelp’s AI model still depends in part on user contributions, and reviewing remains active: Users submitted 22 million new reviews in 2025, up 7% from the prior year, according to the company. Yelp is also rolling out an AI-personalized home feed on iOS, with more tailored content and updates from people users know, as it leans into its core strengths in the AI era.