Yelp just handed OpenAI the keys to one of the internet’s largest troves of local business intelligence. The company announced a data licensing agreement that lets OpenAI tap into Yelp’s reviews, ratings, photos, and business data to power local recommendations inside ChatGPT.

The deal, revealed during Yelp’s Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings release, gives OpenAI access to 330 million cumulative user-generated reviews and more than 8 million business listings.

What the deal actually looks like

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman framed the partnership as a way to extend Yelp’s content into the AI-driven local discovery space.

The financial specifics of the licensing agreement remain undisclosed. But the broader numbers tell an interesting story. Yelp posted record net revenue of $1.46 billion for 2025, and its “other revenue” category, which includes data licensing, grew 17% year-over-year.

Worth noting: the relationship between these two companies isn’t brand new. Yelp has been using OpenAI’s models since at least April 2024 to power its own Yelp Assistant feature, a conversational AI tool for navigating local businesses.

Stoppelman also indicated that further AI partnerships are in the works. Yelp is apparently in discussions with other AI entities about additional collaborations, suggesting the company sees data licensing as a growth engine rather than a one-off deal.

The bigger picture: AI’s data hunger and who gets paid

This is part of a much larger trend. OpenAI has signed content deals with publishers, news organizations, and data providers across multiple industries. Reddit licensed its data to Google.

What this means for investors

Yelp’s $1.46 billion in 2025 revenue, combined with 17% growth in its licensing segment, suggests the company is successfully diversifying beyond its traditional advertising model. If additional AI partnerships materialize as Stoppelman hinted, data licensing could shift from a secondary revenue line to a primary growth driver.

The risk, of course, is concentration. If OpenAI represents a significant chunk of that licensing revenue and the relationship sours, or if OpenAI builds its own local data capabilities, Yelp’s new revenue stream could evaporate. Diversifying across multiple AI partners, which appears to be the strategy, would mitigate that risk considerably.