How Yelp Ads drove a 28% jump in AI visibility for a home service brand

Stock photo by Todd Kent

Summary

When a national home service brand realized it wasn’t showing up when consumers were searching in AI, its award-winning agency, GALE, launched a strategy to quickly improve its AI visibility. GALE launched Yelp advertising campaigns in specific cities, saw a 28% increase in the brand’s AI visibility in those cities, and went from trailing two competitors to ranking #1 in LLM visibility across key, non-branded queries in its category.

Background

Consumer search behavior and expectations are shifting faster than anything ever seen in consumer tech—from classic lists of results to instant AI answers. Platforms like ChatGPT reached nearly 900 million weekly users by late 2025, making AI the fastest-growing consumer search technology ever.¹ With over 60% of U.S. adults recently using AI tools² and traditional, organic search click-through rates plummeting up to 62.5% when AI Overviews are present,³ making sure your brand shows up where consumers are searching in AI is crucial. Whether you’re a plumber operating in one region or a globally recognized brand, AI search is the next great opportunity to win.

A home service brand understood this well and, through their agency GALE, tracked AI visibility across multiple AI tools. When they saw they were trailing competitors, appearing less than 40% of the time for local searches, they knew they needed to build a strategy to invest in the platforms AI relies on.

Solution

GALE and its home service client noticed Yelp was a highly-cited source for AI recommendations in their category. They launched targeted Yelp CPC campaigns in select cities while leaving others untouched and monitored the change in AI visibility across national and local prompts. Yelp advertising was the only change made to the marketing program in each city during the test.

Results

An investment in Yelp Ads changed how often AI surfaced the brand in consumer answers, and the difference was dramatic:

• 7% increase in the brand’s LLM visibility where Yelp Ads ran
• 28% increase in the citations of the Yelp Pages being indexed by the LLMs in cities where ads were active (compared to a 21% decrease in citation presence where Yelp Ads weren’t running)
• Brand rose to #1 in local AI visibility within seven days⁴

Spending on Yelp Ads displays your business on syndicated web pages and prominently on Yelp’s search results pages under the valued Yelp brand, signaling its trustworthiness to AI through the frequency of its visibility and the high-value nature of Yelp’s authentic content.

In cities where Yelp advertising was active, citations of the Yelp pages being indexed by the LLMs went up by 28%.

— GALE, business agency