During its Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings release, Yelp announced a data licensing deal giving OpenAI access to 330 million user-generated reviews, ratings, photos, and more than 8 million business listings.
The data will feed local recommendations inside ChatGPT, extending Yelp's content into AI-driven discovery for the first time at this scale.
Financial terms were not disclosed. What Yelp did share: it posted record net revenue of $1.46 billion for 2025, and its "other revenue" segment, which includes data licensing, grew 17% year-over-year.
CEO Jeremy Stoppelman framed the agreement as a way to push Yelp's content into spaces where AI assistants are replacing traditional search. He also signaled that more deals are coming, saying the company is in active talks with other AI companies.
The two companies are not strangers. Since at least April 2024, Yelp has been running its own Yelp Assistant feature on top of OpenAI's models, a conversational tool that helps users navigate local business options.
This fits a pattern that has been building across the industry. Reddit sold its data to Google. News publishers and data providers have signed similar arrangements with OpenAI. Real-world, human-generated content has become one of the most competed-over commodities in tech.
For Yelp specifically, the licensing push looks like a deliberate pivot away from dependence on advertising revenue. If the pipeline of AI partnerships Stoppelman hinted at actually closes, licensing could shift from a footnote in the financials to one of the company's main growth lines.
The obvious risk is concentration. If OpenAI accounts for a large share of licensing income and eventually builds its own local data layer, that revenue disappears fast. Spreading deals across multiple AI partners, which appears to be the current plan, reduces that exposure considerably.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.
