Yelp today published new research showing that Gen Z, a generation frequently characterized as impulsive and influencer-driven, in fact conducts extensive research before spending money, and remains largely unconvinced by AI-generated summaries when making purchase decisions. The study, conducted in partnership with Angus Reid Group, surveyed 1,323 unweighted respondents aged 18 to 29 across the United States between February 2 and February 19, 2026, according to Yelp.

The research arrives at a moment when platforms across the advertising industry are racing to position themselves inside AI-mediated discovery, even as the consumers those platforms serve express persistent doubts about the accuracy of AI-generated answers. For marketers and publishers who have spent much of 2025 and 2026 reorienting strategy around large language model visibility, the Yelp data offers a counterpoint: the audience segment often assumed to be most comfortable with AI mediation is, by this measure, among the least trusting of it.

Gen Z researches before spending, despite its spontaneous reputation

According to Yelp, the survey challenges a persistent narrative about Generation Z as impulsive consumers swayed primarily by influencer recommendations. Across every category tested, a large majority of respondents said they research on at least one platform before making a purchase decision. The figures break down as follows: restaurants at 97 percent, beauty at 94 percent, fitness and wellness at 93 percent, home services at 92 percent, and professional services at 84 percent.

Quynh-Nhi N., a member of Yelp's Elite Squad based in Dallas, described a two-step discovery pattern that surfaced repeatedly in the research. "I use TikTok just to watch the video, but I go over to Yelp to see a little bit more detail on what everyone else is saying about the new places," she said, according to Yelp. That pattern, video for initial discovery followed by written review for verification, appears throughout the study's qualitative findings, and it complicates any assumption that short-form video alone drives Gen Z purchase decisions. Video may open the door. Written detail, according to the data, is what gets someone through it.

Written reviews outperform influencer recommendations by wide margins

The survey found that Gen Z favors detailed written reviews over influencer recommendations in both categories tested. For dining decisions, 78 percent of respondents favored written reviews compared with 59 percent for influencer recommendations, a 19-point gap. For service professionals, the gap held at a similar magnitude: 81 percent favored written reviews against 61 percent for influencer picks.

That preference extends beyond the reviews-versus-influencers question into a related one: whether star ratings alone carry enough information to act on. According to Yelp, 77 percent of respondents said they trust platforms with detailed written reviews over those offering only star or numerical ratings when researching services, and 76 percent said the same held true for restaurants. A numerical score, however favorable, cannot describe a wait time, a menu item, or whether a technician actually showed up on schedule. Gen Z appears to want that context spelled out, not implied.

Two Yelp Elite Squad members elaborated on what makes a review useful in practice. "I like the honest reviews. I want to hear, how long did you have to wait for something? Did you go back to this place again? Was this service the best service you ever had?" said Angelina E., a Gen Z Yelp Elite member in Orlando, according to Yelp.

Miranda M., a Yelp Elite Squad member in Brooklyn, drew a direct comparison with how star ratings function on rival platforms. "I feel like people tend to explain more on Yelp. On Google, it'll show when someone leaves a five star rating and like there'll be no detail. I want to see words or pictures and more about the experience, not necessarily just individuals and their ratings. I am looking to pick a good place that's going to fit the vibe for everyone," she said, according to Yelp.

Takeout and dining dominate discretionary spending

Food emerged as the clearest spending priority within the survey. According to Yelp, 78 percent of respondents reported spending money on takeout or delivery in the past month, and 72 percent reported dining out in person over the same period. Spending in both categories is also increasing year over year: 45 percent of respondents said they are spending more on takeout or delivery than a year earlier, and 45 percent said the same for dining out at restaurants.

The pattern holds even when unexpected money enters the picture. When asked how they would allocate a bonus or a gift, 74 percent of respondents said they would put it toward dining out, and 70 percent said they would spend it on takeout or delivery, according to the survey.

Price outweighs ambiance as inflation persists

Cost considerations ranked ahead of atmosphere in the survey's findings on restaurant selection. According to Yelp, the menu itself was the most influential factor at 89 percent, followed closely by price at 87 percent. Ambiance, by comparison, registered at 73 percent, a meaningful gap that the survey's authors linked to a persistent high-inflation environment.

Miranda M. explained how she uses Yelp's photo features to gauge affordability before spending. "A lot of hole-in-the-wall restaurants don't have a website that has a menu. So I'll go to Yelp and look into the photos, sometimes people will post a menu and that gives me a good idea. I'll send it to my friend group and say, does this price point meet everyone's expectations?" she said, according to Yelp.

Quynh-Nhi N. pointed to a related behavior around timing and value. "I really value when people on Yelp post when the happy hours are and what that menu looks like, because a lot of times I feel like I'm digging a little bit for those little details," she said, according to Yelp.

Price sensitivity extended into service categories as well. According to the survey, 85 percent of respondents said price was influential when choosing a service professional such as a hair stylist or a pet groomer. Beyond price, 81 percent cited up-to-date business information as a key factor, and 80 percent pointed to ease of booking, a combination the survey's authors said reflects an expectation for instant, low-friction access to information.

Trust in AI summaries lags well behind trust in human-written text

The clearest divergence in the research concerns artificial intelligence. According to Yelp, only 48 percent of respondents said they trust AI-generated summaries to be accurate for service professionals, and the figure drops further, to 43 percent, for restaurants. Both numbers sit well below the 76 to 81 percent range recorded for trust in detailed written reviews across the same categories.

Yelp said this finding aligns with earlier research the company conducted jointly with Morning Consult, which found Gen Z was the demographic most likely to want proof of trusted sources when using AI search tools. That earlier study, published April 14, 2026 and reported by PPC Land at the time, surveyed 2,202 U.S. adults and found that just 15 percent of respondents overall said they trust AI search platforms "a lot," even though 65 percent had used one within the prior six months. That earlier survey also found that 72 percent of respondents wanted AI platforms to always disclose where their information originates, and 69 percent wanted the option to leave an AI platform to visit a trusted source directly.

The gap between AI trust and human-review trust identified in the new Gen Z-specific data is not isolated to Yelp's own research. Comparable industry data on Generation Z trust patterns has surfaced elsewhere in recent months. A YouTubecreator marketing study conducted with Kantar and published through Think with Google found that 79 percent of Gen Z viewers said they trust recommendations from creators, a figure that sits closer to the written-review trust levels in Yelp's data than to the AI-summary figures, suggesting the trust gap runs specifically along a human-versus-machine axis rather than a broader skepticism toward all forms of online recommendation.

Methodology and survey construction

According to Yelp, the survey was created by Yelp employees and distributed by Angus Reid Group via email to a sample of panel participants across urban and suburban areas of the United States. Fieldwork ran from February 2, 2026 through February 19, 2026. Participants received incentive points added to their Angus Reid Group panel accounts. Yelp said the term "Gen Z" throughout its published findings refers specifically to the surveyed subset aged 18 to 29, comprising 1,323 unweighted respondents and 1,232 weighted respondents. Rim weighting was applied across region, generation, and gender to align the sample with broader population parameters.

Context: Yelp's parallel push into AI-mediated discovery

The research lands alongside a separate set of announcements from Yelp concerning its own artificial intelligence infrastructure, disclosed in the same week. On July 24, 2026, Yelp licensed its reviews, photos, and business information to OpenAI for use inside ChatGPT, an arrangement under which the chatbot will surface Yelp content, including ratings and business details, as part of its responses to user queries. Four days later, on July 28, 2026, Yelp introduced more than a dozen updates to Yelp Host, its AI-powered phone answering service for restaurants, including a new integration with OpenTable and native food ordering for pickup orders, according to a PPC Land report published at the time. That report noted Yelp Host had fielded more than 1 million calls since its October 2025 launch, growing at an average of 38 percent month over month.

Placed side by side, the sequence of announcements presents an internal tension worth noting without resolving it for the reader. Yelp is simultaneously expanding the reach of its content into AI systems built and operated by other companies, while publishing survey data suggesting the audience it serves does not fully trust AI-generated output on its own. Whether that tension is a contradiction or simply reflects a division of labor, with AI handling logistics such as call answering and reservations while written human text continues to carry the evaluative weight of a purchase decision, is a distinction the research itself does not attempt to settle.

Why this matters for marketers, publishers, and platforms

For PPC Land readers working across programmatic advertising, paid search, and platform policy, the Yelp findings intersect with a debate that has been building steadily across 2025 and 2026: whether AI-mediated discovery genuinely displaces the kind of first-party, user-generated content that built platforms like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google's own review ecosystem, or whether it simply adds another layer that consumers filter through before trusting a source enough to act on it.

The 15-percent overall AI trust figure from Yelp's April 2026 Morning Consult research, referenced again in this new study, has become something of a reference point across the trade press precisely because it complicates the assumption that AI adoption and AI trust move in lockstep. Usage of AI search tools was already at 65 percent among U.S. adults as of that earlier survey. Trust lagged usage by a wide margin then, and the new Gen Z-specific figures suggest that gap persists even among the demographic assumed to be most native to AI-mediated interfaces.

That distinction matters directly for how advertisers and publishers plan content and citation strategy. If a platform's business model increasingly depends on being cited accurately inside AI-generated answers, and the audience receiving those answers discounts them relative to detailed written text by a margin approaching 30 to 35 percentage points, then citation alone may not be sufficient to preserve consumer trust or referral value. The findings suggest platforms and brands may need to think about how AI summaries link back to, rather than replace, the underlying written source material that consumers say they actually trust.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Yelp, in partnership with Angus Reid Group, conducted the research; Gen Z Yelp Elite Squad members Angelina E., Miranda M., and Quynh-Nhi N. contributed direct commentary.

What: A survey of 1,323 respondents aged 18 to 29 found that Gen Z researches extensively before spending across every category tested, favors detailed written reviews over influencer recommendations by wide margins, and shows limited trust in AI-generated summaries, with only 43 percent trusting such summaries for restaurants and 48 percent for service professionals.

When: Fieldwork ran from February 2 to February 19, 2026. Yelp published the findings today, July 30, 2026.

Where: The survey covered urban and suburban areas across the United States.

Why: The findings challenge assumptions that Gen Z is an impulsive, influencer-driven consumer segment, and they complicate the broader industry push toward AI-mediated discovery by showing that even a digitally native demographic places significantly more trust in detailed, human-written text than in AI-generated summaries, a gap that carries direct implications for how platforms, advertisers, and publishers structure content and citation strategy going forward.