What does Yelp’s AI assistant tell customers about my business?
It tells them what it can piece together from three places: your reviews, the information on your Yelp page, and your own website. Yelp announced the assistant in fall 2025 as a way for consumers to ask questions and get answers drawn from those sources. You can’t script what it says, and nobody can promise what it will say about you. You can make sure the sources it reads are accurate, and you can find out what it says by asking it yourself, the way a customer would.
What it reads, and what you control
Your reviews. You don’t write them and you shouldn’t. Never fake them, never pay for them, and never ask only the customers you expect to be happy. Each review site has its own rules about whether and how a business may ask — read Yelp’s before you ask anyone for a Yelp review.
Your Yelp page. Hours, holiday closures, services, the area you serve, how booking works: whatever the page lets you fill in, fill in, and keep it current. An outdated closing time on the page is the kind of detail an assistant can repeat to a customer as fact.
Your own website. It’s the one source where you write every word. A plain page of questions and answers, in the words customers use on the phone, gives the assistant something clear to work from. Do you take walk-ins? Do you speak Spanish? Do you come to my area? Short, direct answers beat polished marketing copy.
Questions on your Yelp page. Businesses can still answer questions on their own Yelp page. Answer the ones people ask, accurately and briefly. That helps the customer reading the page whether or not the assistant is involved.
Google works the same way now: its Ask Maps button answers from reviews, profile data and the business’s website, which we explain in what happened to Q&A on your Google profile. One set of clean sources serves both.
Ask it about yourself
The simplest check takes a few minutes. Open Yelp the way a customer would, find the assistant, and ask the questions your customers actually ask about a business like yours: whether you’re open on a given day, whether you take walk-ins, whether you speak Spanish, whether you serve their neighborhood. Write down what it says.
Then compare each answer to the truth. When something is wrong, trace it to a source: an old hour on the page, a stale line on your website, a review describing a service you no longer offer. Fix the source you control. We can’t tell you how fast the assistant picks up a change, so check again later rather than assuming it did.
Do the same check after any change to your hours, services or location. It’s the cheapest way to catch a wrong answer before a customer acts on it.
When you don’t need to worry about it
If very few of your customers come to you through Yelp, this is low priority. Look at how people really find you; if it’s mostly Google, referrals or walk-ins, put your time there first. The groundwork is the same anyway, and the same steps help with other AI assistants.
And keep expectations honest. No one outside Yelp controls the assistant’s answers, and anyone promising to make it say something specific about you is promising something they can’t deliver. Accurate sources are the part that’s yours.