YELP INC. The KeyBanc Technology Leadership Forum 2026

Thanks, Sergio, for having us at the conference. We will be making some forward-looking statements during the conversation today that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on the risk factors that may affect our results.

Yeah. We posted our Q2 results last week, and a theme for us has been the local physical economy has been pressured through, it started in 2025, and it is certainly been the case here in 2026. In particular, on our restaurant, retail, and other side, which we are really best known for, that was down 10%. Our services business, which is now 70%, was actually flat on the year. Overall, we did it, we are up 1%. That local physical economy, why is that happening? There is a combination of things. You can really put it down to inflation. Consumers have seen prices go up a lot. They are unwilling to pay more, and then the input costs for these businesses just keep going up, whether it is on the services side, the materials. There is less labor, so labor costs seem to be up. On the restaurant side, it is ingredients.

Imports obviously have tariffs on them, and so margins have been squeezed and consumers are more reluctant, so there are fewer dollars going into advertising. That was definitely a big theme for us. At the same time, we have what we call other revenue. It consists of three categories. We will talk more about them. Transaction, subscription, and licensing. That grew 98%, so obviously want to talk more about that. I think the thing that did surprise us a little in the second quarter, but we were quite pleased to see, was incremental traffic on the SEO side. That was both due to some algo changes at Google, as well as work that we are doing on SEO. Then we also saw improvements in app downloads, both from the traffic we were getting to mobile web, but also from some of our partners.

That certainly, we bucked the trend in the second quarter on that traffic acquisition piece, and so that was certainly encouraging.

We believe that is happening for a couple of reasons. One, first, the categories that we serve are categories that highly monetize on Google as well. So they do not want to interrupt that monetization for themselves, and so we are an indirect beneficiary, is our presumption. Obviously, we cannot be certain about that. What does seem more clear is that the algo changes that Google has been making, and this is both here in 2026, but we also saw it in 2025, really focusing on human-generated content. Of course, Yelp is human-generated content in the form of reviews, and we put a lot of effort into ensuring the quality of those reviews. So we actually deprecate about 25% of the reviews that we receive to ensure that quality, and so we think that that is actually being rewarded.

At the same time, there are a lot of technical aspects to SEO that we've been working on, and that's been actually an effort that's gone on for some time now, and we're seeing some of the fruit of that. One of the benefits, of course, is if you're able to generate this human-generated content, and you're able to present it to Google in a way that the algo prefers, that's where the technical piece meets the preference on their side, then you see more traffic. So that has been good for us.

Yeah. So it's still really early on the LLM front. Interestingly, of course, Google still has its dominant market position. That's unchanged. At the same time, we're encouraged. We see these third-party studies. We've done some work of our own, and it seems like Yelp is one of the top reference sites across LLMs.

Again, I would just chalk that up to the fact that we have this human-generated content, and we put so much into the curation of that content, and it is highly relevant to what consumers are looking for. Depends on the source, but it seems like 25% to 35%, maybe even 40% of search has local intent to it.

If you're an LLM and you want to be in search, then you certainly have to produce good local search results. Of course, we think that that means you need to work with Yelp.