Yelp expands AI assistant to book reservations, delivery and services

Yelp pushed its AI assistant beyond answers and into action, letting users book restaurant reservations, order delivery and schedule local services without leaving the conversation. The April 21 Spring Product Release added more than 35 features and updates, and moved the assistant into a dedicated tab on iOS and Android across every category on Yelp.

The new version is built to handle the full path from discovery to checkout. Yelp said the assistant can connect with Yelp Guest Manager for table bookings, DoorDash and Grubhub for takeout and delivery, Vagaro for beauty and fitness appointments on iOS, Zocdoc for healthcare appointments on iOS, Calendly for scheduling and RepairPal for auto-repair requests. It also lets users request quotes from professionals in more than 450 service categories. In one demo, a Yelp product lead used it to look for dog-friendly hiking spots, line up takeout with a DoorDash order, ask for weekend restaurant recommendations with a table-booking option, and even seek advice on painting a friend’s Victorian house.

That shift matters because it changes Yelp from a local-search directory into a transaction layer. A user no longer has to jump between search results, booking pages and delivery apps. Yelp can hold the conversation, surface the option and carry the user into the purchase or appointment. For restaurants, delivery platforms and home-service professionals, that means the company sits closer to the point where interest becomes revenue, with more influence over which businesses get seen and which ones get booked.

Yelp says the assistant is meant to solve a trust problem in AI search. Chief product officer Craig Saldanha said there is a “massive gap” between consumer adoption of AI search and trust in its results. Yelp is leaning on what it says are hundreds of millions of reviews, photos and detailed business listings from its community, rather than AI-generated summaries, to validate recommendations. The company first introduced Yelp Assistant in 2024 to help consumers hire service professionals and answer questions about individual businesses. Its April 30, 2024 release said the feature was powered by large language models from OpenAI and Yelp data, including Request a Quote and business information, and first appeared in the iOS app through a Projects tab.

The broader strategy is clear: keep users inside Yelp longer, make the assistant more useful than a generic chatbot and turn local search into local execution. Yelp also said an upgraded Menu Vision feature can identify dishes from a phone camera and pull up reviews and photos, while desktop rollout of the new assistant features is expected later in 2026. The company is no longer just helping people find local businesses; it is trying to own the handoff from search to sale.