Yelp Inc (YELP) May 27, 2026 Conference Transcript

All right, great. Hi, everyone. I'm John Colantoni from Jeffrey's Internet Team. I'm joined by David Schwartzbach, Yelp's Chief Financial Officer. David, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks, John, for having us at the conference. We'll 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.

All right, great. So Yelp, Yelp's a company that's been around a long time. I think everyone in this room, everyone listening at some point has probably used Yelp, and I would be surprised if it was not the case. But, you know, Yelp's been on a journey. Things have been changing, evolving over time. Catch us up on where you are today.

So Yelp has changed quite a bit over the years. Of course, we still do reviews and have ratings, but the whole experience has evolved considerably from its earlier days. Folks are not generally familiar, but Yelp today has about 70% of its revenue coming from services, although best known for restaurants, about 30% of revenue comes from what we call restaurant, retail, and other categories. That's 85% of the traffic, but 30% of the ad revenue. So that's a big change. Another big change is... In the past, Yelp was very much growing by adding sales headcount in that sales headcount driven growth model transition to really a product led growth model. And so now we enter this current era with obviously all the transformation that's coming about with AI. And we're really leaned in around that both operationally and in the products that we're building.

Yeah, AI, not a thing that a lot of people are talking about these days, but I'm just kidding. AI is obviously, it's something that Yelp is investing quite a bit behind, you know, and I think you're really starting to lay out a case for Yelp being an AI-first company in many regards. Talk a little bit about what you're doing in AI. Talk about what you're sort of most excited about.

So we have definitely leaned in, and we're in the midst of transforming both the consumer experience, the product experience, but also the way we work. And the way that we're doing that is first, of course, the Yelp experience. The traditional search box is evolving, returning links is evolving, and that's headed towards a conversation. The way we think about it is really providing answers and answers in a conversational format. So we recently released our new Yelp Assistant. It's on the app and there's a separate tab for it. What's really important about that now, because it's conversational, is it can be expressive. It can have personality and it can explain to you why did it pick these search results. I think that's something that's extremely new. In the past, you got a set of search results. You may or may not know why you got those results. Now, with the new Yelp Assistant, it actually first explains that. And I think the second part is we know that LLMs have a lot of error associated with them from our own experiences using them. We present the evidence. Why do we believe that this is relevant to you? You can click through and see even more of that. And then the last part is, of course, in this era where agents can go and do things for you, we're really leaning in around enabling actions, so answers and actions in a conversational format that's very engaging. So we're super excited about that. Early returns are very good around the product. People like it. They're engaging with it. It's still very, very early. So that's the core Yelp experience, and that's going to be true for both the services side of the business as well as restaurant retail and other. Extending beyond that, we now have a product that we call Yale Post. We'll talk a little bit more about that, I'm sure, but that's where we have an AI voice answering the phone at a restaurant, and we started out with that being around answering questions or making a reservation, but we now have in testing food orders over the phone, and that's a very complex product. We're proud of that product, and we recently acquired a company called Hatch. This is AI lead. management. And it's really engaging with the consumer after they click on the ad to convert them into a lead. And we're excited about what we're doing there. So when you put all that together, the consumer facing side is changing the what we're providing to businesses around AI tools are changing. And then I think something that's very, very promising is as we develop these capabilities for the consumer facing or business facing products, we can actually bring them internally and change the way that we're working. So the voice product, for instance, we're now applying to the customer success organization and things that we're developing internally. We can apply to products that we are providing to consumers or businesses. An example of that is we now have an AI sales coach for our sales reps, and it helps them to be more effective on the phone. Well, that's something that other businesses want to do as well. And so we're bringing that expertise, know-how, and technological capability into the products that we are looking to provide to businesses. So it's really end-to-end, and over the long term, we see a tremendous boost in productivity that we can get from this and bringing a lot more products to market.

Can we dig a little bit more into Yelp Assistant? Maybe you should give some specific examples about how that enhances the consumer experience and then how you envision the enhancements that it provides sort of helping drive KPIs that you care about, things like engagement, click-through, time spent, and then ultimately what does that mean for your ability to sort of monetize people's engagement?

So Yelp has this very rich set of reviews. They're text-based, they're human-generated, and they're very... Um, insightful into the experiences that people have had and they're extensive. We do a tremendous amount to ensure their quality. We actually don't even display 25% of the reviews and ratings that we receive. So we're really, really focused on quality. Why is that important for Yelp assistant? The training data that goes into fine tuning the Yelp assistant in its responses and also the depth of content that it can draw upon to create the answers for consumers really distinguish And then you add to that again, and I really want to emphasize this, this idea that in a conversation the LLM can explain why did it select or why did we use our matching algorithm underneath to provide this particular recommendation to you, that is really, really differentiated because then you can engage with it, and I think this is the crucial word, engage with it, engagement, to refine what you're looking for. No, no, no. I wasn't actually interested in that. I was interested in this. Oh, okay. I didn't understand that. Let me give you these results. Does this better match what you're looking for? Just that iteration with the person who is looking for a service pro or a restaurant, I think is very much a new interaction mode. Even beyond that and in time, although it's not something that's in the product today, it could be that, hey, I want to go to a restaurant. I want to be on the patio. We have kids. And it could say, well, it's actually going to be raining. Are you sure you want to be on the patio? Perhaps you want to be indoors, but there's a place that's better for kids. So we can start to incorporate lots of other pieces of information around the local experience into the Yelp Assistant. So we think that there's a lot of breadth that we can bring, and that results in what's a very important metric to us, which is engagement and repeat visits. And so the better the quality, the more engaging it is, the more relevant it is, the confidence that you have in it because it provides the evidence, and then the actions that it can take on your behalf that are properly done, that we believe will lead to more engagement and more visits from consumers.

Maybe we could talk a little bit about Hatch. It almost feels like Hatch is almost like the sort of Yelp assistant for the advertiser, but for people who aren't as familiar with the business, maybe you could just sort of, from a high level, explain what Hatch is. And how you plan to integrate that into the lead flow on Yelp.

Yeah. So Hatch is an AI lead gen management product. And so after you click on an ad. And you come to, and this works across platforms. It's not just on Yelp, but if you come to Yelp, it actually engages with the consumer through text to begin with. We also have voice. And it is going to ask questions. It's going to. It's going to be able to recommend a visit, or it's going to be able to inform the person about some of the capabilities that that particular service pro has. And this is for services, just to clarify, we acquired it in February, $270 million acquisition, $30 million of retention paid out over two to three years. And the more that we have had the chance to really learn about the product and work with it, we're really, really impressed by its capabilities. And we're obviously bringing that to advertisers on Yelp. But again, it's not limited to Yelp. It works across other platforms like Google, Angie, Thumbtack, and others. And that's really an opportunity for us to move into this AI tools era where you're providing businesses with capabilities that they may not otherwise have had access to in the past in a way that adds value to them and frees them up to really focus on driving their overall business. So we've been super pleased. In March, we hit $34 million in annual run rate revenue, growing at 92%. We were obviously very pleased with that. We're continuing to invest. We've added sales folks. We're adding engineering capabilities. We're bringing know-how over, and very pleased with that acquisition.

Just sort of somewhat related, but I want to talk about sort of capital allocation. You know, you bought the Hatch business. You know, you also did a pretty high level of share repurchases in Q1. You've recommitted to continuing to do share repurchases. You also drew on Revolver, and sort of your, despite that, your cash balance is at a multi-year low. Just talk a little bit, obviously cash-generated business, but just sort of talk about how to think about You know, your decision to draw on the revolver, your how you're thinking about capital allocation, you know, anything that you think is sort of relevant in the context of all that.

So in the first quarter, we did deploy a considerable amount of capital, as I mentioned, 270 million to acquire Hatch. We also did repurchase one hundred and twenty five million dollars in stock just for reference on the. Number of from the first quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, diluted shares declined 12%, 12%. So that's obviously considerable. Now, what we have shared is that we don't expect to repurchase shares at nearly the same rate as we move through the rest of 2026. This is, though, a new era for Yelp. We've run consistently large cash balances in the business. It is very cash generative. In 2025, we generated $324 million in free cash flow. So that's obviously a very strong free cash flow margin, and we're pleased with that. It's a strong cash-flowing business, and we will be providing, I think, more context and background for investors on the Q2 call around our go-forward view. Just for reference, at 331, we had $130 million in debt outstanding, $110 million in cash. So, obviously, we're at that basically net zero cash at the moment. But we see the opportunity to use capital to further enhance the business as we go forward. We need to earn that right. We need to execute well on Hatch. We would definitely look to do additional acquisitions. We feel like we were really disciplined in the price that we paid for Hatch. We obviously were able to close the transaction with them and bring Hatch on board to Yelp, and we see plenty of opportunity to do more of that in the future, but again, we'll share more about capital allocation in our approach, particularly around debt, long-term debt, capital structure, when we get to the Q2 call.

It feels increasingly like a land grab for AI companies to get user-generated content, and obviously Yelp has a lot of it, and it's been accumulated over a long period of time. You have started to sign some licensing agreements, and your expectations are that that's going to continue to sort of grow over time. Talk about how you think about the opportunity to generate revenue specifically from those arrangements and how you might be able to leverage those arrangements to help drive some, you know, maybe top of funnel benefits for Yelp.

So from our perspective, companies that want to provide AI search need to have local AI search. It's not enough to have general search. You have to have this vertical-specific local search because a significant proportion of queries from consumers have local content to them, somewhere on the order of, call it 25 to 50 percent. It's a wide range, but that's the estimate. And we have a very complete directory. We obviously have these high-quality reviews and ratings, and we've been able to enter into license agreements with quite a few different companies. You'll find Yelp license content on Apple Maps. We've been there for some time. You'll also find it in Alexa on Amazon in Bing. You'll find it on Meta.ai. We recently entered into agreement with OpenAI. You'll find us on Yahoo. So I think this thesis that Yelp has valuable... Content that folks want to be able to display to their consumers, that thesis is playing out and we're being paid for it. But it doesn't stop there. What we are finding is that when that content is displayed, those platforms want to display the Yelp logo. And why is that? Because the Yelp logo has authority to it. The content is very high quality. And so when a visitor comes and they do that search and they see, say, a 4-2 rating, they know that they can rely on it because it has that Yelp logo associated with it. So we think that gives us ubiquity and presence, and it's a form of brand advertising for us. And, of course, we're associated with great brands in their own right. And what I think is emerging is this perspective that consumers don't want to stop there because LLMs can make errors. Consumers want to be able to see the evidence and click through to learn more, see more photos, read more reviews. So we're optimistic about the potential. It is still quite early around all of these AI search engines, but we feel like we're delivering real value to consumers and to those businesses, and we see an opportunity. So you get this really strong and nice profile, which is you get, we're earning licensing dollars, which is very, very high margin. We're putting our brand in front of folks when they're searching, and ideally, we'll also get traffic back.

Okay, let's go into the results recently, starting with the services business, which had been an area of strength for a number of years. More recently, it slowed. Talk a little bit about sort of what you're seeing. What are the dynamics that are driving the business to see some slowdown? What are some initiatives that you have that you're sort of putting behind the operations there to help drive sustainable growth over time?

So services has been a real standout for us over the years and had very strong double-digit growth that decelerated in 2020. Five. The first quarter was quite strong. Some of the macro shocks have really impacted, though, these local businesses and consumers. And what we saw with last April around tariffs was actually a slowdown in advertising that persisted through 2025, continued into 2026. And that dynamic also seemed to play out as the war with Iran emerged. So that dynamic hasn't gone away where folks are feeling more pressured, I think, on the consumer front with a higher price of gas and higher cost of groceries and things like that. So they're not quite as active. At the same time, there's been significant wage pressure for a lot of these businesses. And so when you have that, consumers doing a bit less and you have an increase in cost, then obviously margin gets compressed. And that has an impact on. Now, it grew 1% in the first quarter, and, you know, we continue to invest heavily in that business to create experiences that will deliver value to advertisers while also enabling consumers to really get whatever job done that they need. And again, just go back to Yelp Assistant. We started out with Yelp Assistant really was focused on services through our request-to-quote product. Request-to-quote is where you answer a series of questions to get matched with pros. That's almost entirely monetized, and it has the benefit of really delivering value without being perceived as high ad load. So that was where Yelp Assistant started. We're going to continue to invest there, and of course, we really want to deliver valuable leads to advertisers, and obviously Hatch is part of that story because they increase the conversion from click to lead. So we're going to continue to do a lot more around services. And we always want to lean in there and be positioned to take advantage of increased activity when it comes

Restaurant, retail, that's been one where, you know, that segment has been under some stress in recent years. Talk about sort of what's going on there, what you're doing to sort of help reinvigorate growth.

Yeah, so restaurant retail and others certainly been more pressured than services. And this but the story is somewhat similar in that the input costs have risen pretty dramatically over the past several years. Again, there's wage, but there's also the cost of ingredients that are pressured margins. And what we've seen is that advertisers with those pressured margins have pulled back in the amount of advertising. I think we've heard through a variety of their earnings calls from A number of restaurant companies that consumers have are going out less frequently or trading down. And that certainly has added to the pressure there. So that has emerged. At the margin, we've certainly seen people shifting to delivery. And so that's a different channel that people are going through and advertisers are choosing to advertise on. So at the very margin, that's certainly something that's been relevant. But again, as we've seen, inflation tick up and people pressured with price at the pump, you just see people eating out less. And I think there's just an unwillingness to continue to absorb these price increases that restaurants have had to do in order to just cover their costs. So it's a very pressured part of the local economy, and we're certainly exposed to that. One of the reasons that I didn't mention but that we have really focused on these AI tools is we have become more exposed to the cycle, the economic cycle, and we've wanted to diversify revenue and really lean in with our distribution capability in order to sell AI tools and add new revenue sources to Yelp.

Just sort of continuing on there, I think in April, you mentioned seeing seasonal trends that were more consistent with what you would normally expect. Is that light at the end of the tunnel? Are you starting to see some improved macro dynamics? Maybe talk about what you saw there and how you factored that into your outlook for the second quarter and the rest of the year.

So I'll reserve my comments to when we made them on the earnings call and only speak to that date. So we did see this dynamic that we saw in April of 2025, which is a flattening of what is typically a ramp in seasonal advertising. As spring comes, people get tax refunds, and the weather improves so that they can do work on the house or do landscaping work. Of course, people start to travel more. And what we saw was an impact on that ad spend that was similar to what we saw in April of last year. Now, that did improve somewhat as we got out of March and into April. We factor all that into the guidance that we provide, and obviously, we're not sitting on our hands. We're not satisfied with the performance of the business, and we're continuing to iterate and evolve, bring more product to market. Of course, we're always focused through our sales force to be as efficient as we possibly can be, and at the end of the day, we have to deliver value to both consumers and advertisers, and that's what we remain focused on.

All right, I think we've got time for one more. Actually, I see one second, but I think we're going to do it anyway. All right, let's talk about margins. So you talked about investing for growth. You also talked about the opportunity to see margin expansion over time, strong growth in margins over time over the next several years, I think is how you reference it. Talk a little bit about the dynamic of investing for growth today and then sort of how you see the opportunity to drive margin expansion over time and what gets you there.

Yeah, just to start with 2026, we did guide lower than the performance that we saw in 2025. We delivered $365 million of adjusted EBITDA last year. We got it 310 to 330 this year. It is an investment year. I just point out other revenue for us, which consists of these AI tools, subscription, transaction revenue, and licensing grew 75% in the first quarter. And we obviously made this large investment in Hatch, and we want to invest in it with that 92% growth that we saw in March. And on the transaction side, we saw 88% growth in food delivery referrals. So you've got a real signal that there's a great opportunity there. We want to lean in around that. At the same time, we also have seen the opportunity to invest in paid search to bring some more traffic to Yelp, and we've really refined that over the past two years to focus on mid-market and enterprise customers to deliver leads to folks who are willing to pay for that incremental lead. And on top of all that, we are in the midst of this AI transformation. We don't want to miss out. We think that Yelp is a winner in this transition, and we think they're really good at applying AI to the experiences that we create for consumers and advertisers on Yelp. So it's an investment year. It's an opportunity for us. And as you said, this is emerging very rapidly. Businesses are adopting it, and we want to capture a market share around all of that. At the same time, what's very clear is that productivity is going to go up for folks working not just at Yelp, but I think it's going to be generally true to say the obvious. And so we see significant opportunity over the coming years to drive that productivity up, which we believe will lead to expanded adjusted EBITDA margins. And we're seeing that in product and engineering where we're able to bring products to market much, much faster. Just as a very quick example, for our Yelp host product, we realized that the TAM was going to be a lot bigger if we could do food ordering. And it was maybe six, eight weeks between when we decided that, and we actually had a food ordering product in market testing. And that is just was not possible in the past. And by the way, food ordering is very complex. And if you think about it, this is voice, this is over the phone to do it accurately. And to ensure that the customer picks up the right thing or the, you know, when they come into the to the restaurant, that's not trivial. We've been really pleased with that quality. It's still very early, but I think that's just a reflection of the ability to drive revenue with the team that you have. And so over the long term, I'm optimistic about the margin expansion potential for Yale.

David, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having us.