Yelp Inc. (YELP) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Thank you for joining us. On the consumer side of our business, we saw encouraging traffic trends in the quarter with improvements in app installs and page views. Moving to our product initiatives, we have reconceived how consumers and businesses connect on Yelp through a conversational experience that provides answers and enables actions. Central to this updated experience, the new Yelp Assistant, which works across all categories, demonstrated early positive signs in user engagement. In services categories specifically, Yelp Assistant has been an important driver of project submissions and monetization, contributing to overall project growth of approximately 10% year over year. We are delivering AI tools that help service pros and other local businesses grow, operate and succeed. For advertisers, we improved our advertising technology and ad formats. We also directed leads acquired via paid search to multi location services advertisers, which contributed to substantial budget growth from these customers over the first half of the year. Our team continued to scale Yelp Host, our AI-powered call answering service for restaurants, which reached an annual run rate of 2.4 million calls handled in July, more than tripling from January. We recently rolled out a number of updates to the product, including 16 new languages and an integration with OpenTable that enables consumers to book and manage reservations automatically via Yelp Host. We also significantly expanded Yelp host market opportunity by adding food ordering functionality with full point of sale integration, which enables restaurants to take phone orders for pickup without added fees. We accelerated our strategy in this area for services businesses through the acquisition of Hatch in February. Hatch annual run ...