A new competitive analysis of over 28 million AI responses has found that Yelp is cited far more often than any other local discovery platform when consumers ask AI tools to recommend plumbers, salons, restaurants, and home services. The data, published today by Foundation Marketing in collaboration with AirOps, covers the fourth quarter of 2025 and tracks citation behaviour across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode.

According to the report, Yelp accumulated 512,680 total citations across those four platforms in Q4 2025 - 3.4 times more than the Better Business Bureau (BBB), which ranked second with 149,710. Angi came third with 145,633, followed by Thumbtack with 56,004, HomeAdvisor with 33,582, and NextDoor with 10,308. Yelp's total citation volume exceeds BBB and Angi combined.

The research is notable both for its scale and for what it reveals about how AI systems select sources when handling queries with clear commercial intent. For marketing professionals tracking the shift from traditional search to AI-generated responses, the numbers add concrete data to a landscape that has until now been difficult to measure with precision.

A dataset built on 28 million queries

The study draws on two datasets collected by AirOps. The first tracked citations across the four major AI platforms for six local discovery platforms - Yelp, BBB, Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, and NextDoor - across Q4 2025. A citation was counted each time an AI-generated answer referenced a URL from one of those domains. According to the report, this dataset provides the aggregate competitive totals and platform-by-platform rankings used throughout the analysis.

The second dataset covered a monthly growth and intent analysis running from September through November 2025 across 28.5 million questions and 318 million total citations. This portion of the research tracked month-over-month growth trends, intent signal analysis, and citation density metrics. A separate supplementary dataset covering Q4 2025 home services data - including December - was used specifically for the multiplier effect case studies.

One important scope note accompanies the data: the competitive set was limited to the six platforms listed above. Broader platforms such as Google Maps and TripAdvisor were not included. All competitive claims in the report are scoped to that six-platform set.

Google AI Mode drives the bulk of Yelp citations

The breakdown by AI platform is striking. According to the report, Google AI Mode accounted for 340,721 of Yelp's 512,680 citations - approximately 66 percent of the total. Perplexity was second at 146,196. ChatGPT contributed 25,681, and Gemini returned only 49 Yelp citations across the quarter.

On Google AI Mode specifically, Yelp captured 72.5 percent of all citations in the competitive set - 6.5 times more than Angi, which ranked second on that platform with 52,541. On Perplexity, Yelp held a 62.1 percent share and a 4.9x lead over the next closest competitor. On ChatGPT, by contrast, BBB led with 68,617 citations, followed by Angi at 44,356, with Yelp ranking third at 25,681.

On Gemini, Yelp ranked sixth with minimal presence; Angi led that platform with 18,870 citations. However, according to the report, the platforms where Yelp lags - ChatGPT and Gemini - represent just 5 percent of total local discovery citation volume. AI Mode and Perplexity, where Yelp holds the top position, account for the other 95 percent.

PPC Land reported in July 2025 that a SISTRIX analysis of 10,000 keywords found Yelp capturing 0.66 percent of all Google AI Mode citations across the broader web - a figure that now has additional context given the category-specific concentration shown in the Foundation Marketing data.

"Near me" queries: where Yelp's lead is widest

Proximity-intent queries - the "near me" searches that signal someone actively looking for a service provider right now - are where Yelp's advantage is most pronounced. According to the report, Yelp generated approximately 290,000 "near me" citations across AI platforms in Q4 2025. All five competitors combined totalled roughly 87,000. That gives Yelp a 3.3x lead on just this segment of local queries.

The breakdown by platform for "near me" queries tells a clear story. Yelp received 190,420 "near me" citations from AI Mode, 93,730 from Perplexity, and 5,724 from ChatGPT. Angi, the nearest competitor, collected 10,303 from AI Mode and 10,271 from Perplexity. Thumbtack received 8,657 from AI Mode and 15,756 from Perplexity. BBB trailed significantly on these proximity queries despite ranking second overall.

Why does proximity intent amplify Yelp's position so dramatically? The report points to citation density as an explanatory mechanism. According to the analysis, "near me" queries make up only 17.5 percent of questions but drive 34.2 percent of all Yelp citations - a 2x overrepresentation. The density effect varies by vertical. Retail and e-commerce showed the highest proximity lift at 3.82x, followed by food and dining at 3.77x. Home and property services registered a 1.82x proximity lift.

Within home services specifically, the "near me" data across Perplexity and AI Mode together produced more than 66,000 Yelp-cited answers. Cleaning and plumbing each generated over 2,100 Yelp-cited "near me" answers in that subset alone.

The multiplier effect in home services

One of the most technically specific findings in the report concerns what the researchers call the multiplier effect - the ratio between the number of unique questions asked about a service category and the total number of Yelp-cited answers those questions generate.

For plumbing on Perplexity, 75 unique questions produced 1,787 Yelp-cited answers across the quarter - a 24x multiplier. For the same plumbing queries narrowed to "plumber near me," 24 unique questions produced 1,168 Yelp-cited answers on Perplexity alone - a 49x multiplier. On AI Mode, 24 unique "plumber near me" questions produced 982 Yelp-cited answers, a 41x multiplier.

The handyman category shows the concentration dynamic even more sharply. Just 10 unique questions about handyman services generated 287 Yelp-cited answers on Perplexity (a 29x multiplier) and 235 on AI Mode (a 20x multiplier). When filtered to "handyman near me" specifically, 4 unique questions generated 184 Yelp-cited answers on Perplexity (46x) and 148 on AI Mode (37x). The report notes that just 4 unique "handyman near me" questions generated 332 Yelp-cited answers across both platforms.

The top three home service categories by total citation volume were cleaning and housekeeping at 6,200 citations, repair services at 5,300, and plumbing at 3,600. Together those three categories accounted for over 15,000 Yelp-cited AI answers.

Industry breakdown: beauty leads, restaurants are competitive

Personal care and beauty is Yelp's largest vertical in the citation data, accounting for 24.1 percent of all Yelp citations tracked. According to the report, nearly half of those citations (46.9 percent) come from "near me" queries - the highest proximity concentration of any category in the dataset. The citations-per-question ratio for this vertical stands at 21.47. The data shows Yelp out-cites StyleSeat by 9.4x and Varago by 12x in beauty-related AI responses, despite both being platforms built specifically for that industry.

Food and dining presents a more competitive picture. TripAdvisor, UberEats, DoorDash, OpenTable, and Instacart all have citation volumes in the restaurant category. According to the report, Yelp generated 14,100 restaurant citations in Q4 2025, more than TripAdvisor (4,327), UberEats (4,123), DoorDash (2,506), OpenTable (2,357), and Instacart (1,148) combined. Notably, 26.4 percent of restaurant queries carry commercial intent - nearly three times the rate in the beauty category, making the restaurant vertical particularly valuable from an advertiser perspective.

Home and property services accounted for 9.3 percent of citations with a citations-per-question ratio of 12.73. Healthcare and medical contributed 5.8 percent of total citations, with 23.3 percent of those coming from "near me" queries.

Category queries dominate, brand searches trail

One pattern that recurs throughout the analysis is the dominance of category discovery queries over branded searches. Between September and November 2025, the share of Yelp citations driven by category queries - non-branded searches like "best plumber in Austin" or "top-rated cleaning service near me" - ranged from 91.1 percent in September to 96.8 percent in October and 96.7 percent in November.

Brand-led queries (those where a brand name appears explicitly in the question) account for only 6.1 percent of questions and produce just 3.3 percent of Yelp citations, roughly half the citation density of discovery-oriented queries. The report notes that brand recall produces the lowest citation density of any intent type.

The intent language breakdown from the growth analysis dataset - covering 29,310 total questions and 300,021 Yelp citations - shows "best" appearing in 54.6 percent of questions and driving 59.9 percent of citations. "Near me" appears in 17.5 percent of questions but drives 34.2 percent of citations (2.0x over-index). "Top" appears in 3.9 percent of questions and drives only 3.4 percent of citations (slight under-index). "Rated" appears in just 2.4 percent of questions but produces above-average citation density - the report suggests AI models lean more heavily on Yelp's review corpus when users explicitly ask about ratings.

Growth trajectory: 19x in two months

The monthly growth figures from the September-November 2025 dataset are particularly significant. According to the report, total citations across all sources grew roughly 3x between September and November. Over the same period, Yelp citations grew by approximately 19x - from 10,288 in September to 95,528 in October (a 829 percent increase) to 194,205 in November (a further 103 percent increase).

Yelp's citation share across the overall dataset went from 0.02 percent in September to 0.12 percent in November - a 6x share increase even as the total citation pool was itself expanding rapidly.

A separate ChatGPT-specific analysis also addresses retention. According to the report, citations per answer on ChatGPT dropped 51 percent between November 2025 and January 2026 - from 15.49 to 7.63 - as ChatGPT compressed its overall source count. Despite that compression, Yelp's cohort retention on ChatGPT improved: 49.3 percent from September to October, then 62.3 percent from October to November, then 64.8 percent from November to December. Additionally, 32.8 percent of September's Yelp-cited questions were still earning Yelp citations five months later, suggesting persistent source selection rather than one-time inclusion.

What this means for local advertisers

This data arrives at a moment when the marketing industry is actively recalibrating how it thinks about local visibility. Yelp's own Q3 2025 earnings showed strong demand for its data licensing products, with management noting that AI search platforms were actively seeking access to its trusted local business content. Data licensing revenue increased 17 percent year-over-year in that quarter.

A separate Yelp survey published in April 2026 in partnership with Morning Consult found that while 65 percent of US adults had used an AI-powered search tool in the past six months, only 15 percent said they trust those platforms "a lot." That same study found 57 percent of consumers use AI tools for local business discovery monthly, and 76 percent say it is important to see where AI information comes from. The structural demand for sourced, verifiable AI answers helps explain why platforms with deep review corpora - and Yelp in particular - are cited heavily in local AI responses.

Yelp's April 2026 Spring Product Release tied the same consumer trust research directly to product strategy, expanding its AI Assistant feature to a dedicated tab on iOS and Android and integrating booking and quote-request functionality into the discovery interface.

For local businesses, the citation concentration dynamic identified in the report has a practical implication that differs from traditional search engine optimisation logic. AI platforms are not asking thousands of unique questions about each service category. They ask a small set of high-intent questions repeatedly, pulling from the same sources each time. Winning on 10 to 75 category-level queries - rather than ranking for hundreds of keywords - is the structural challenge that AI local search creates.

The report's citation density data reinforces a finding that PPC Land has tracked across multiple AI citation studies: LinkedIn's AI citation research from March 2026 found that educational and informational content is cited far more frequently than promotional content, a pattern that appears to hold across AI platforms generally. Platforms with deep repositories of user-generated evaluative content - reviews, ratings, structured business data - appear to be treated as decision-support infrastructure by AI models, not as promotional channels.

The Foundation Marketing and AirOps research covers Q4 2025 and was published on May 28, 2026, by Foundation Marketing's Ross Simmonds.

Timeline

  • September 2025: AirOps begins monthly citation tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. Yelp's citation share in the growth dataset stands at 0.02 percent, with 10,288 monthly Yelp citations.
  • October 2025: Yelp expands AI features including assistant, menu vision, and call answering tools. Yelp citations in the monthly growth dataset reach 95,528 - an 829 percent increase from September.
  • November 2025: Yelp citations in the monthly dataset reach 194,205 - a further 103 percent increase. Total AirOps Q4 competitive tracking dataset records 512,680 Yelp citations across all four AI platforms. Yelp reports Q3 2025 revenue of $376 million, noting strong demand for AI data licensing.
  • December 2025: Amazon integrates Yelp into Alexa+ for home services bookings via voice. ChatGPT citation retention for Yelp cohort reaches 64.8 percent month-over-month.
  • January-February 2026: ChatGPT overall citations per answer drop 51 percent from November 2025 levels, while Yelp retains 32.8 percent of its September-cited question set. Yelp acquires Hatch for $270 million.
  • March 2026: LinkedIn AI citation research finds platforms with structured, evaluative content are cited most heavily by AI systems - a pattern consistent with the Yelp citation data.
  • April 14, 2026: Yelp and Morning Consult publish consumer trust research showing 57 percent of Americans use AI for local business discovery monthly, but only 15 percent trust AI search results "a lot."
  • April 24, 2026: Yelp launches expanded AI Assistant as the central interface of its mobile app.
  • May 28, 2026: Foundation Marketing and AirOps publish the full citation analysis report, covering Q4 2025 data and September-November 2025 monthly trends.

Summary

Who: Foundation Marketing and AirOps conducted the analysis. Yelp is the subject. The competitive set includes BBB, Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, and NextDoor.

What: A competitive citation analysis of 28 million-plus AI responses to local business queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. Yelp received 512,680 citations in Q4 2025 - 3.4x more than the second-ranked platform (BBB at 149,710) and more than all five competitors combined.

When: The primary dataset covers Q4 2025 (October through December). The monthly growth and intent dataset covers September through November 2025. The report was published on May 28, 2026.

Where: The analysis covers AI responses across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode in the United States. The six platforms tracked are all US-based local discovery services.

Why: The research matters for marketing professionals and local businesses because it documents, with specific numbers, how AI platforms select and cite local service sources when handling proximity-intent and category discovery queries. As AI-generated answers displace traditional search results for a growing share of consumer queries, understanding which platforms AI systems treat as authoritative has direct implications for local advertising strategy, data licensing value, and how businesses should prioritise their digital presence.

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