The AI Visibility Brief: July 20-26, 2026

THIS WEEK

• ChatGPT is adding Yelp's reviews, ratings, and photos to its local answers
• A fifth of the web pages AI search cites do not exist anymore

01

ChatGPT is adding Yelp's reviews, ratings, and photos to its local answers

OpenAI and Yelp announced a licensing deal July 23. It lets ChatGPT use Yelp's reviews, ratings, photos, and business details in its answers to local questions, about 330 million reviews across more than 8 million business listings, with Yelp's name and a link shown when its content is used. The two companies also plan a quote-request feature, so a person could ask who should fix their roof, read what other customers said, and contact a business straight from ChatGPT.

We think this matters because a business's reviews are becoming source material for AI answers. They used to matter when someone was only browsing Yelp. Now ChatGPT reads them too, and what it says about which businesses are reliable comes from customer testimonials.

Businesses should act on this by taking their Yelp page seriously: accurate hours and services, and a steady flow of new customer testimonials. If a plumber's reviews keep mentioning fast emergency work, that detail is there for ChatGPT to use when someone asks for exactly that.

02

A fifth of the web pages AI search cites do not exist anymore

Otterly tested whether the web pages cited by seven AI search engines still exist, and published the results July 24. Of the more than 20 million cited web addresses it checked over one month, about one in five did not return a live page. The page had been deleted or moved, but the engines kept citing it, because they answer from a stored copy of the web and that copy updates slowly. ChatGPT had the highest rate of dead citations at about 25%, and Google AI Overviews had the lowest at about 13%. Otterly also looked at the PDF files these engines cite. Most of them, 77%, have no publication date, and of the PDFs that do have one, 40% are more than five years old.

We think this matters because the AI models may be reading outdated information about your business. What is out there right now, including pages written years ago and forgotten, is what these answers can get built from.

Businesses should act on this by going through the old pages and PDFs on their website, dating what is worth keeping and updating what is stale. An undated pricing sheet from 2021 looks current to an AI tool.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter.
Sincerely,
Brett