AI citation study: is Yelp cited by AI?

Yelp is a directory of local businesses enriched with consumer reviews, star ratings, photos and practical attributes: opening hours, price level, neighbourhood, reservations, delivery, accessibility. It covers restaurants, but also home services, medical practices, car repair, beauty salons and many other trades.

For an AI model, a Yelp page meets two needs at once. It confirms that a business exists at a given address, and it summarises how customers experienced it. That combination makes it a frequent source for "near me" recommendations in American cities.

Yelp is also known for its automated recommendation software. It separates the reviews displayed in the main feed from those moved to a "not currently recommended" section, and only the first group counts in the star rating. A model reading the page therefore sees a filtered picture.

Yelp citations come from local intent in an English-speaking, mostly North American context.

• "Best tacos in Austin", "Brunch spots in Brooklyn open on Sunday".
• "Reliable plumber in San Diego", "Emergency locksmith near downtown Chicago".
• "Is [restaurant] good for a date?", "[dentist] reviews".
• "Highly rated hair salon in Toronto for curly hair".

The same request about Lyon, Munich or Milan usually leads elsewhere: TripAdvisor for restaurants, national directories, local press or the websites of the businesses themselves. Yelp pages exist for many European cities, but with fewer reviews, so they carry less weight as evidence.

Yelp only becomes a source when a model actually opens one of its pages. An assistant answering from memory may still recommend a famous diner, but without a link, and that kind of mention is not counted here.

Perplexity, and ChatGPT when its search runs, retrieve live pages, so Yelp listings can show up in their sources for US local queries next to city guides and other directories. Grok adds posts from X to its web results and can use a Yelp page to support a local suggestion.

Gemini is grounded in Google Search and can also rely on Google's own place data, which gives it an alternative to third-party review pages. Claude displays fewer sources by default, so Yelp appears in its answers mostly when web search is switched on.

Because each assistant updates its search partners and display rules, the balance between them can move from one month to the next without any change on Yelp's side.

The prompts tracked here mostly concern French-speaking markets, where Yelp plays a minor role. A low citation rate says more about the geography of the questions than about Yelp's importance in the United States.

For a brand that sells to American customers, the platform deserves more attention than these averages suggest. The monthly table split between French and English answers gives a better sense of its weight in English-language contexts.