Yelp at Goldman Sachs Conference: Embracing AI for Growth

Published 10/09/2025, 01:22
Yelp at Goldman Sachs Conference: Embracing AI for Growth

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Yelp Inc. (NYSE:YELP) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025, outlining its strategic shift towards AI-driven innovation amidst a challenging macroeconomic environment. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and CFO David Schwarzbach emphasized Yelp’s focus on enhancing user experience and business operations while navigating both growth opportunities and sector-specific challenges.

Key Takeaways

  • Yelp is integrating AI to improve user interactions and business operations, with a focus on services.
  • The company is seeing growth in services revenue, despite challenges in the restaurant sector.
  • AI-driven data licensing agreements have generated over $10 million in annual recurring revenue.
  • Yelp is committed to strategic ROI-driven investments and returning capital to shareholders.
  • The company is exploring partnerships with search platforms to leverage its data assets.

Financial Results

  • Restaurant Business: Continues to face softness due to high labor and input costs, and consumer price sensitivity.
  • Services Business: Reported an 8% increase in revenue, though seasonal patterns were less pronounced.
  • Data Licensing: AI search players contributed over $10 million in annual recurring revenue.
  • Capital Allocation: Yelp is reducing stock-based compensation and maintaining low capital expenditures.

Operational Updates

  • AI Initiatives: Expansion of Yelp Assistant and AI-powered answering services like Yelp Receptionist and Yelp Host.
  • Internal Productivity: Deployment of AI tools like "ChatBench" to enhance productivity and sales coaching.
  • Product Development: Focus on multi-location services with API integration and expansion of Yelp Assistant in the restaurant sector.

Future Outlook

  • Strategic Direction: Yelp is focused on AI as a transformative technology to enhance the platform and user experience.
  • Expansion Opportunities: Potential partnerships with search engines to enhance local search experiences.
  • Investment Priorities: ROI-driven investments and disciplined M&A to accelerate growth and expand business.

Q&A Highlights

  • Multi-Location Services: Yelp sees significant opportunity in underpenetrated multi-location advertising.
  • Restaurant Sector: Enhancing the user experience through AI to tap into restaurant content.
  • Capital Allocation: Continued commitment to returning excess capital to shareholders and considering strategic M&A.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Eric, Interviewer: I think in the interest of time, we’re going to get going with our next one. It’s great to have the team from Yelp here. We’ve got Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, and David Schwarzbach, CFO. Jeremy, David, thanks so much for being part of the conference again.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Great to be here.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay, David, I know you’ve got a safe harbor to leave, so I’m going to yield the floor.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Perfect. Thanks, Eric, for having us at the conference. We’ll be making some forward-looking statements during the conversation today that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on the risk factors that may affect our results.

Eric, Interviewer: There you go.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Thank you.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Thank you.

Eric, Interviewer: Love it.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Well done.

Eric, Interviewer: We got through it. Jeremy, I want to start with you. I think when I think about the company, you’ve been at the forefront of trying to continue to pivot product and platform and be a product-first CEO and founder for a long period of time. Where are you on the journey of where you want to take Yelp from an evolution standpoint against the backdrop you see today?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah. We’ve been around for a while, over 21 years. I think, you know, coming out of the pandemic, it’s really been a services-focused, product-led story, and that’s served us really well. We’ve grown revenues dramatically. We’re very proud about that. Teams executed. We built a lot of innovative things within the services space in particular, but across all of Yelp. Now we are at a moment of great, you know, shift, another platform shift, if you will, which is AI. I think that is unlocking possibilities that, you know, we would have never imagined a few years back, and so that’s really exciting. You know, we’ve got some new products coming I’m sure we’ll talk to. We’ve got our core Yelp Assistant, which has been focused on the services side, that we think is a leading-edge experience for consumers, matches consumers with business owners around projects.

We’ll be bringing that, for example, across all categories. We think that’s really going to reinvent the consumer experience on Yelp, which we’re really excited about.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. We’re going to get into a lot of that as we go, but I think one of the level-setting mechanisms at this conference is always to ask what you see in the current macro environment today. You have two different businesses. You have a services business. You have a sort of an RRO segment. Sort of talk a little bit about what you see from the business behavior across the different segments you operate in.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, we’ve seen on the restaurant side of the business, you know, softness continue. It was that way last year as well. There’s a lot of macro effects going on there. Labor costs shooting up, input costs shooting up, consumers being a little bit fed up with the price tag when they go out to a restaurant. That has continued to be a headwind there. On the services side, you know, revenue was up 8% in the quarter, and, you know, we did see, with the tariffs and all the chaos in April, we saw that affect the business, slow things down from the trajectory that we were on. We still did grow in the quarter, but the seasonal pattern was more muted. That was a bit frustrating, but we also have a lot of great things coming and, you know, continue to see growth on the services side.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Understood on the environment. Turning to the competitive landscape, when you think about who you compete against and what that landscape looks like right now, when you look across the search, the services landscape, how would you assess who you compete with and what the competitive landscape looks like today?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: I would say, you know, despite all the AI changes and so forth, it hasn’t changed a whole lot since last time we talked. You know, you still have your vertical, focused players, your Thumbtack, your Angi, et cetera. You know, you also have, of course, Google and its local and maps experience as well. Of course, then, you know, there’s the impacts of AI and you have some of these new AI search players or potentially general search players. I think that’s, you know, a potential opportunity for Yelp.

Eric, Interviewer: Yeah. What does the landscape look like in terms of traffic sources for you as Yelp? Obviously, you’ve done a lot of work in getting people to come directly to the app, direct to the property, but there are still external traffic sources. There’s a lot of nuance around how some of the third parties have changed how they deliver traffic to counterparties. What have you seen there?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, I mean, I’d say the traffic picture for us hasn’t changed dramatically. We do have a very successful app. You know, I’d have some great and exciting plans for that. We continue to get some traffic from SEO. There’s also the SEM side of it, the paid traffic side where we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation. We’ve also found a lot of success there bringing in business owners through paid traffic through SEM over time.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. What have been your, let’s turn the conversation to AI, which obviously continues to be the.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: I guess on the traffic one, I didn’t know if, were you thinking about any of the sort of like Google-related, because I know some companies have been affected.

Eric, Interviewer: I was going to ask about Google AI overviews or things like that. Are there elements, because we’re getting that question a lot from investors as well, like the traditional funnel that might have contributed traffic to you, how that’s outside of your control because Google’s changing the surface of what they show a consumer. Any impacts or any dynamics there of what you’re continuing to see?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, we haven’t seen from an AI overviews perspective any kind of impact really. I think what’s going on there is Google obviously is trying to make sure that its experience is somewhat similar to what you could find on a ChatGPT. When it comes to queries that are highly monetized, drive a lot of revenue for Google, what you’re seeing is a smaller percentage. It’s probably single-digit. I have no idea, but probably a single-digit percentage. They’re far more cautious. If there is an AI overview, you might find it buried towards the bottom of the page. It’s really been the same as it had been prior to them starting to add AI layers to search results.

Eric, Interviewer: Yeah, we’ve written about that. I mean, we’ve looked at a lot of traffic sources, talked to advertising folks. It feels like AI overviews are more blanketed towards non-commercial queries than commercial queries, pretty much.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, which is a smart strategy in the sense of like consumers are obviously those who’ve run into lots of queries that aren’t monetized. They see all of this experience that feels maybe more modern, yet the sort of core business remains pretty much the same.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Let’s get back to your core business. What have been the key learnings so far from the rollout of the Yelp Assistant?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: The key learning is that AI can deliver a lot of value if you apply it in the right way. I think Yelp Assistant was not an easy endeavor. We were quick to make a lot of AI applications. We were quick to make a very cool demo, but it did take some time to really get it right and have it perform better than our status quo experience. That was a lot of last year. This year, it’s really been about expansion, rolling it out in more places. We still have, in the second half, bringing the Yelp Assistant experience to users that have not registered. We do see a lot of logged-out traffic, people that haven’t fully registered for Yelp. Right now, they can’t experience Yelp Assistant.

I think opening up that funnel to Yelp Assistant is going to be really powerful, drive a lot more projects to the business owners that rely on us for leads.

Eric, Interviewer: Whether it’s the, let’s stick with the consumer side of the equation first, whether it’s the Yelp Assistant or maybe a product roadmap that we’re not aware of. I’m not asking you to sort of push you to announce something, but how does the user experience you think change on Yelp over the next three to five years, anchored around what you’ve learned today versus what you’re most excited about in terms of changing that UI or UX?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: I think the Yelp Assistant represents a very exciting platform for us. Right now, it’s been service-focused, but there’s no reason for that other than that was sort of where we started. We do see it as an opportunity to go cross-category. We’ve talked about that is coming in the second half. I think that’s going to be super exciting from a consumer standpoint. It really reinvents the way that you are tapping into all the incredible, you know, human-created knowledge that is within the reviews and the photos and the videos.

To be able to have a conversation with Yelp and get very, very specific on like what exactly you’re looking for, what’s the ambiance of that restaurant, what do you want on the menu, do you want a kid, you know, all of these things that might have been like lots of bells and whistles and switches you’d have to find yourself to be able to navigate to that business yourself, all of that becomes incredibly easy and intuitive. We do think Yelp Assistant is a reinvention of the consumer experience. I think it provides a roadmap for that three to five-year period. You can imagine that Yelp Assistant also taking care of lots of things, making bookings on your behalf. You know, it’s not just maybe talking to the plumber, but also navigating with the scheduling software that the plumber has on the backend as well.

There’s a lot to do there, very long roadmap, but we’re excited to make it bring it to life.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Maybe flipping to the other side of your business, and you alluded to it a little bit, but in terms of the application of AI to the way local businesses interact with you, service providers, for lack of a better term, the supply side of the equation, where do you see the most friction or the most interesting opportunities for AI to drive incremental supply growth, supply conversion, supply frequency, things that maybe can be big components for the business over the medium to long term?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: I mean, I think from the supply side, you’re talking specifically about how are we attracting businesses that are targeting?

Eric, Interviewer: Yeah. Businesses, service providers, and where AI can be applied to, bringing in volume on that side of the market.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the really exciting ways that we’re going to be talking to business owners about something new is with our Yelp answering services products. We have one specific to services businesses. We have one, that one’s called Yelp Receptionist. We have one called Yelp Host. We know in talking to our customers that they struggle with, and these are real small businesses, they struggle with answering the phone. Like if you’re under the sink, it’s hard to pick up when that consumer’s calling. If you’re having a fun weekend, you know, away, maybe you’re in Vegas, like you’re not picking up your phone. You’re potentially, you know, it’s going to voicemail. It’s very conventional. You’re not capturing the lead. You’re not, you know, understanding a priority of those leads and all of that.

Over the last several months, we have built these answering services that are very lifelike, that have, you know, human intonation. It’s kind of shocking, actually, talking to one of these. In our quarterly investor letter, we provided a link where you can go and listen to a demo of it. I think it’s quite cool, obviously. I’m a little bit biased, but we know that businesses are missing calls a lot of the % of the time. Those are leads that are falling on the floor. That could be leads that we generate, so that’s even worse, where it’s like they paid real money to drive a lead to their business. That person didn’t get a pickup. The business didn’t really capture the lead, missed opportunity.

Providing an answering service that can actually get the relevant information, make sure the business owner sees it, if it’s a really big job, can jump on it. We think that’s really powerful. That drives better ROI for the businesses, but it also gives us something brand new to talk to all these different service providers about, which can also have an energizing effect on selling all of the products that we have.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Maybe one more for you, and then I want to bring David Schwarzbach into the conversation also. If we pivot to the services segment part of the business, you’ve seen sustained help in Request to Quote. Curious if you can drill a little bit down into the strength you’re seeing in the services side of the business. How do you think about building and scaling continued momentum on services on a multi-year view?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really about continuing to create something that’s compelling for consumers. You know, there’s a lot happening, obviously, with the general search space. I think if you take an experience like what we have with Yelp Assistant, one, we can attract new consumers because I think it’s very innovative. As we go cross-category, there’s not going to be anything like it. You can also then wrap it in an API, and you can provide it potentially to these general search players that will be looking in the years ahead to be building out their local experience. If I look back on what did Google do in like 2003, 2004, they were focused on general search. They didn’t have maps. They didn’t organize any local content.

It wasn’t until like 2006 or so that Google even started thinking about how do we solve this, you know, half of the queries have local intent, but we haven’t even really tried to serve up something relevant to consumers. I think a similar thing is playing out among the folks that are trying to provide a competitive alternative to Google, where they have a lot on their plate. They’ve built out sort of a basic experience that is compelling. Obviously, ChatGPT is built, you know, or OpenAI has built a really big brand very quickly, but the local experience is lacking. I think that represents a really exciting opportunity for Yelp, both across the higher frequency categories, but especially on the services side, where if you’re having a conversation on one of these other platforms and you’re saying, "Hey, my SIG’s broken. I don’t want to fix it.

Can you help connect me with a plumber?" Yelp can actually do that. We’ve already built it all out. We’ve wrapped it in APIs. I think we’re at the very early stages of seeing how that gets built out and the partnership opportunities. We did talk in our recent quarterly call about some of the acceleration that we’re seeing on the data licensing side of our business. We’re now north, as of the call, or, on the call, we talked about how we had crossed over $10 million in ARR from these players that are operating in the AI search space. We still think it’s very early. Exciting times, I think, and opportunities for Yelp.

Eric, Interviewer: Maybe double click on that and talk a little bit about the broader data opportunity that exists in Yelp. Obviously, you gave that disclosure bit, but we get that question a lot from investors. There are only a handful of really unique corpuses of data that exist out there, and you happen to have one of them. How do you think about that as an asset for the company, both internally and potentially to drive external monetization?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, I think it’s a bit underrecognized. If you’re trying to build a general search experience, you need highly trusted local data. I think consumers also are very aware of the flaws of these LLM-powered experiences. If you just turn to one of these search services and ask it a question, it spits out some answers. You know that it could be hallucinated. It could be out of date. I think having a trusted partner with a very established brand in this space is really important and value-adding to that experience. I do think we’re going to see more of that. I think if you’re not Google, then you need to be looking for a partner in that space. If North America is high on your priority list, there is an obvious partner, which is Yelp.

We are seeing that in terms of the quality of conversations we’re having in the background on this. We have obviously brought on some partners, and we’ve seen good momentum in the data licensing side. I think, again, we’re still very early in that.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Understood. David, bringing you into the conversation, maybe pivoting to multi-location services. Can you quantify the size of multi-location services opportunity today, and how you’re making progress against penetrating against that market?

David Schwarzbach, CFO, Yelp: We’re actually very underpenetrated in multi-location services, and we see a very large opportunity there. We have seen and are able to increase our growth there as we’ve rolled out a variety of things that those multi-location advertisers require. They’re more sophisticated. They want to have an API for managing their leads because they have a whole system for that. They need to connect to their CRM. We implemented Zapier around that. They want a conversion API now to close the loop on the ROI. We’ve been building out all those capabilities and working with them so that they can really be productive on Yelp, deploy that spend effectively, work the lead, and obviously generate revenue for themselves. Overall, pleased with the progress that we’re making there.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. How do you think about what investments need to be made in that operation in terms of unlocking growth over time? Is it an execution piece or is it also an investment piece?

David Schwarzbach, CFO, Yelp: It’s definitely both. From a product roadmap perspective, you need to continue to invest because each of these folks have implemented, say, a CRM differently. You have to be able to support a broad range of CRMs. That’s one example. Search is moving from links to answers and actions. You need to be able to close the loop on the action piece. Book something that comes back around to the Yelp voice, AI receptionist that we have saved for services, which is it’s not sufficient just to pick up the phone, but the person wants to be able to make a booking at that time. The same thing on the restaurant side, but on the services side, you need to be connected to their CRM and their booking software, whatever it happens to be. More investment required there.

Plus, we need to continue to, on the people side, figure out, hey, how do we support these folks? How do we help them with their implementation of this tooling so that they can get the most value out of Yelp? It is an investment on both sides.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Jeremy, I know you answered my question earlier from a macro perspective with restaurant, retail, and other, but in terms of the things that are inside of your control, are there things away from the macro environment that you’re exploring that could improve the growth of our RNO? How do you almost frame it up as like what can you control versus what is unfortunately out of your control from the way the consumer interacts with that sector?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, I mean, I think we talked about the macro earlier, but on the side that we do control, it’s really the product experience. We have been leaning in. I think the Yelp Assistant experience with the addition of all of the restaurant content, you know, RFN, as we call it, restaurant food and nightlife, I think is an opportunity to reinvent how consumers use Yelp, the type of information they can easily and seamlessly tap into. It will be a product moment, a tentpole moment for us from a product standpoint. I’m really excited to see how does that impact people that maybe over time have drifted away from Yelp because, well, there’s content that’s like kind of okay on other places like Google.

Maybe I don’t have to pay as much attention to Yelp, whereas now Yelp will once again have a very unique consumer experience that frankly you can’t get anywhere else. That’s coming very soon in the second half. Looking forward to seeing the response there.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Maybe just one quick follow-up there. Is there any benchmark you’re willing to share or how you’re initially thinking about what that might do either on the user side or on the business side of the equation? How should we be thinking from the outside looking in, which is how we get to measure you, about what success looks like as that rolls out?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: I mean, I think it starts with how we’re talking about Yelp Assistant and the progress there. Like what are we seeing in terms of consumer response? You know, are consumers using Yelp more intensely as a result? Are they coming back more frequently? These things, depending on which metric we’re talking about, it can take time to really show up. It’s not going to be like day one we open the doors probably and the whole situation has changed. I do think we’ll be talking a lot about what we’re seeing as far as consumer reception of the multi-category assistant. We’ll certainly bring Wall Street along for the ride on that.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Understood. David, pivoting back to you, we’ve anchored most of this conversation around repositioning the platform for the long term, elements of growth drivers, new product initiatives within the company. Talk a little bit about what are the necessary levels of investment in the business to make sure you don’t miss out or forestall any of those growth opportunities in the years ahead.

David Schwarzbach, CFO, Yelp: As Jeremy talked about, we’ve really moved to this product-led growth model over the past number of years. One of the things that we think is very important about that is as you make improvements, those stack over time. We’ve been able to hold headcount flat. This year, we’re committing again for the third year in a row to holding headcount flat, yet product velocity has gone up a lot. Time to deliver products has improved dramatically. We’re really pleased with that overall pace of innovation. We’re bringing this fresh product, the voice AI assistant, to market. We did that, I feel like, in record time for a new product. We’re excited about our continued investment there. That investment is very much around, at the end of the day, what are our people doing with their time? What projects are they working on? That’s separate, obviously, from CapEx.

Our CapEx is overall very low because we’re able to use these foundation models very successfully and effectively. I know we’ll get to it, but we also do see a lot of opportunity to deploy capital off the balance sheet in service to our strategy.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Understood. Sticking with that theme though, one of the questions I’ve asked everyone here at the conference is, against the elements of finding capital for growth and balancing margins, how do you think about deploying AI internally in the company? We’ve talked a lot about the ways AI can infuse into your product and become part of the experiences that external parties have with Yelp as a company. How about internally?

David Schwarzbach, CFO, Yelp: We have quite a few different projects running in order to enhance productivity at Yelp. We very much see these types of technologies as amplifying human potential, not replacing humans. We look at it across, first, product and engineering, of course. We have something that we call ChatBench. Everybody in the company has access to it. They can choose different models. They can run code through it on the product and engineering side. We’re seeing productivity help there. Particularly, these large language models really help with these tedious and repetitive tasks that engineers have to do. It frees their time up to be more productive in driving business value. We’ve most definitely looked at it on the sales and marketing side. That’s both on the customer success as well as the sales piece.

On the sales piece, interestingly, very simple application, making managers more productive by being able to take calls and look at the way that sales reps are engaging with customers and coaching those sales reps. You’re able to digest all those conversations and provide one-on-one guidance for the manager with those people. That just wasn’t possible at scale in the past. On the customer success side, of course, I think everybody’s looking at ways to first answer calls with LLMs, whether it’s, you know, in the voice form or even over the internet. Intercept and then redirecting that call to the right sales rep, that’s, or excuse me, customer success rep, is another way that we’re applying it. On the G&A side, it’s still really very early, I would say.

We’ve trialed quite a few different products, and I think that’s going to evolve, but that’s going to probably be a bit longer. Overall, though, we do see that these efforts are paying off and productivity is improving. I’d still say overall it’s early and it’s not yet this dramatic transformation that I think some might have expected.

Eric, Interviewer: I know you’ve given a framework for the near term. Is there a paradigm you leave investors with about how to think about balancing growth investments and then optimizing for margins, or keeping margins at a certain level to optimize for growth investments? What’s the paradigm you guys talk about internally that you think investors should be thinking about for the company?

David Schwarzbach, CFO, Yelp: ROI, ROI, ROI. We are super ROI-focused, and we look at all of our projects, and we do our best to analyze them to determine what we think the impact on the business is going to be. For more greenfield projects, obviously, you don’t know what the potential impact is, but we want to go after things that have a large opportunity. That’s the balance that we’re going through. We’re going through planning right now. We’re actually having exactly these conversations internally. We want to see how the voice assistant does. Overall, this is, at the end of the day, should we deploy a marginal sales rep? Should we deploy a marginal engineer in order to drive performance?

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. Bringing it home on sort of capital levels, I always like to ask you this question sometimes, even on earnings calls. We have this conversation as well, but the battle for an incremental dollar of capital and the priorities for an incremental dollar of capital, how should we think about that? You guys have been returning capital to shareholders, and that’s been a narrative involved in your equity for quite a while now. What are the rank orders of priorities? More importantly, what might change those rank orders of the priorities in the years ahead?

David Schwarzbach, CFO, Yelp: For folks who aren’t familiar, we are committed to returning capital in excess of a target cash balance to investors. We’ve been doing that quite consistently over the past number of years, and subject to market conditions, intend to continue to do that. That’s first. You’ve seen that start to really show up because we’ve reduced stock-based comp as a % of revenue considerably. You really started to see that show up in basic and diluted shares year on year. I want to say we’re down four or five million from Q2 of 2024 to Q2 of 2025. We’re pleased with the progress that we continue to make there. At the same time, last year we deployed capital through an acquisition, small acquisition of RepairPal. We continue to see opportunities for M&A. We’re very disciplined around it. We don’t have anything to announce at this time.

To the extent that we can drive growth and margin and expand our business and serve our customers and deliver value to consumers through M&A, we’re happy to deploy our unlevered balance sheet on behalf of that ambition. That’s the kind of thing that we will balance against share repurchases to the extent that we see those terrific opportunities. We want to pursue them.

Eric, Interviewer: Yeah, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but the way I’ve always heard it from you guys on the public earnings call is that M&A almost is a tool to speed up your time to market, right? It’s an element where you’ve always been very disciplined. You haven’t done a lot of M&A, but it neatly fits into where you think the market is going in some part of the business. Is that the right way to take away the framework?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Yeah, it’s definitely always about can it serve the strategy? Yeah, how does it fit into the picture? You know, obviously, we’ve been focused on services. RepairPal fits neatly into the services umbrella, and you know, you always have to be searching, I think, for opportunities to drive ROI. Like if there’s something out there, I think it’s our job to evaluate it and step in when it makes sense. We have to be good stewards of shareholder capital, so we don’t want to be willy-nilly about it. If we can accelerate our strategy, accelerate our growth through an organic acquisition, like we definitely want to pursue that as well.

Eric, Interviewer: Yeah. Building on top of that, you know, I always like to ask you as the last question as we have only a couple of minutes left. You know, when you think about your vision for the company, you’ve got the competitive landscape, the overall environment you operate in, and then the things you can control about where you want to take product platform and align against your vision for the company. What does the next three to five years look like for Yelp measured against that dynamic?

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: I think it’s really about platform shift in a sense, with AI being this major new technology. You go back to a 2007 invention of the iPhone, 2008 launch of the App Store. That was a huge transition for us, a huge moment. We had an app that was one of the first in the App Store. I think similarly, we’ve bet ahead on AI. We do see it as a way to reinvent the Yelp experience. We’ve been leaning in as a result. We’ve been investing behind it, both in the core Yelp experience with things like Yelp Assistant, but also trying to find, to identify and pursue greenfield opportunities like our AI-powered call answering services. I think you can expect more of that for the next three to five years.

Eric, Interviewer: Okay. It’s going to be super interesting to watch. This is, I think, one of those transformations of modality and computing that we’ve seen before. It’ll be the third one after we’ve seen two already in our careers. Guys, always appreciate you taking the opportunity to come here and be part of the conference. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, David. Please join me in thanking Yelp for being part of the conference.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp: Thank you. Appreciate it.

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