ChatGPT wants to widen its range of offerings and give users an ever more complete suite of tools. OpenAI’s ecosystem already provides basic features and a growing catalog of extensions designed to keep people inside the chatbot for as long as possible: buying concert tickets, booking hotels, pulling up details on an event, comparing the price of a product, and much more.
Along those lines, Axios reported exclusively in the past few hours that a new partnership between OpenAI and Yelp — the well-known service for finding and reviewing local businesses — has now been finalized. The goal is to give ChatGPT access to a new real-time data source it can draw on to recommend places to visit.
The details of the partnership
The collaboration between OpenAI and Yelp is further proof of how ChatGPT — and AI chatbots in general — are capturing an ever-larger share of the market, at the expense of traditional search engines, whose traffic keeps declining.
The average user increasingly prefers to put questions directly to their favorite AI for everyday searches rather than run a manual query on Google Search or another engine. That is why folding in Yelp’s data can further help anyone looking for information on nearby restaurants, things to do in another city, local recommendations, and more. The deal is sizable: it covers roughly 330 million cumulative user reviews and more than 8 million business listings.
ChatGPT will be able to show Yelp reviews, ratings, photos, and other details as part of its answers to user queries. Whenever OpenAI uses this content, both Yelp’s branding and its links will appear. A “Request a Quote” feature is also expected soon, letting ChatGPT users contact local service providers directly.
The growth of the ChatGPT ecosystem
This agreement confirms an increasingly concrete trend: companies that sit on proprietary data are choosing to become part of ChatGPT rather than compete with it. The same is happening with Reddit, which opted to monetize its data through a deal with Sam Altman’s company. It is a similar picture for several news publishers — though some outlets, like the New York Times, still want to shield their content from large language models (LLMs).
This centralization of services could also spell trouble for the big incumbents. Back to the Yelp integration: giving users real-time information and reviews could push them to abandon Google Maps, at least for this specific use case.
Google has Gemini as its built-in system, but it is clear that the popularity of a platform like ChatGPT could, at the very least, put pressure on the company’s traffic. Investors seemed to endorse the strategic logic: Yelp shares jumped about 8% on the news.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Pasquale Conte on July 24, 2026 as «ChatGPT sfida Google Maps. Accordo con Yelp per cercare negozi e chiedere preventivi via AI». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
