Yelp adds Check for Me, an AI agent that phones restaurants about wait times

What Yelp announced

Yelp has added an AI phone agent to its app that calls restaurants for you to ask how long the wait is. The feature, called Check for Me, is the headline of the company's Fall 2026 product release, which Yelp announced on 20 October 2026 as more than 30 new features, integrations and updates.

The release goes further than one agent. Yelp Assistant, the AI chatbot inside the app, can now book OpenTable reservations, schedule appointments with more service businesses, send recurring recommendations and draw on what it knows about you. A new My Lists feature lets people save and rank places. And for businesses, Yelp is launching Smart Lead Reply, a paid AI agent that answers and qualifies customer requests.

“This release marks the next step in our journey to transform Yelp into an intelligent, more personalized experience that effortlessly adapts to each user's individual needs,” said Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, Yelp's chief product officer.

How Check for Me works

Check for Me shows up on a restaurant's page in the Yelp app and inside Yelp Assistant. You tap “Check wait time now”, enter your party size and phone number, and an AI agent calls the restaurant on your behalf. Yelp says it texts you the current wait time within minutes, so you can decide where to eat without calling around yourself.

It is not live for everyone yet. Yelp says Check for Me is rolling out “in the coming months” on eligible restaurant pages and in Yelp Assistant, in the United States and on iOS only. Yelp did not say how restaurants become eligible or how many are included.

The agent handles one narrow question, which is part of why it is a sensible first step. Asking about a wait time is short, low stakes and easy to check: if the answer is wrong, you find out at the door, rather than after a payment or a booking has gone through.

Voice is now good enough for this kind of call. Speech-to-speech models such as xAI's Grok Voice 3.0 can hold a natural phone conversation, and consumer agents that phone businesses for support and appointments have multiplied over the past few weeks, as TechCrunch noted.

Yelp Assistant books tables and remembers you

Yelp Assistant now integrates with OpenTable, so users can find and book tables at what Yelp calls tens of thousands of restaurants across the US, on iOS. People can also join a Yelp Waitlist from the chat and get updates when their table is ready. With its existing Yelp Reservations, DoorDash and Grubhub integrations, Yelp says the assistant can now book or order from more than half a million restaurants.

The assistant is also becoming a way to hire tradespeople. Yelp says about 10 percent of Request a Quote submissions, the form people use to ask contractors for prices, came through Yelp Assistant in the second quarter. New scheduling integrations with ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro, and an expanded Calendly link, let users book directly with more professionals, and they can now request quotes for up to five projects in one conversation.

A feature called Keep Me Posted lets users set up scheduled recommendations, such as weekly date night ideas or dog-friendly hikes, delivered as push notifications. Answers will draw on reviews, refer back to earlier conversations and take real-time weather into account, so the assistant can steer you away from a patio table on a rainy night, CNET reported.

TechCrunch reported that chat history from the past 30 days is available in the app, with full history to follow. The assistant is also now reachable from search pages and the search bar on iOS and Android, not just its own tab.

My Lists and weekly picks

My Lists lets people build “Been Here” lists of places they have visited and “Want to Go” lists of places to try. Lists can be filtered by location, category and cuisine, and shared by text or on social media. The tab is on iOS and Android, and lists can be viewed on desktop.

Starting next month, Yelp says it will send weekly personalised recommendations based on what users have marked as visited and how they ranked it. That gives Yelp a direct signal of taste to feed its AI recommendations, alongside the reviews it already hosts.

Smart Lead Reply for service businesses

The business-side launch is Smart Lead Reply, rolling out next month. When a customer submits a project through Request a Quote, the AI agent replies instantly, answers questions, gathers project details and qualifies the lead. Businesses can customise it with scheduling links, pricing and promotions.

It will cost $30 a month for businesses in eligible categories that use Request a Quote, including movers, roofers, plumbers, home cleaners, contractors and electricians. A redesigned Aggregated Leads Center lets businesses with several locations answer requests from one inbox, and new integrations with Jobber and Workiz connect Yelp leads to those field service tools.

“A hardworking Pro shouldn't have to choose between the job in front of them and winning their next customer,” said Charles Deutsch, senior vice president of pro revenue at Housecall Pro.

For advertisers, Yelp Audiences campaigns now match a person's past search intent on Yelp with the most relevant brand creative across the web, and a Shopify Conversions app links Yelp ad clicks and views to store purchases. Small businesses are a contested market for AI tools: Meta has been courting them with its own agents for customer inquiries, and recently rewrote its business crawling terms after publisher backlash.

When an agent calls an agent

Yelp sits on both sides of the phone line. TechCrunch noted that Yelp launched an AI voice product last year that answers calls for restaurants and service providers. With Check for Me, Yelp is now also placing calls for diners, which raises the possibility that a user's agent ends up talking to a restaurant's agent, and that the conversation breaks down.

CNET pointed to the friction already building: businesses are dealing with a growing number of calls and emails from bots, while human customers compete with AI agents for reservations. Restaurants that take calls by hand will now field some from Yelp's agent during busy service.

The wider trend is assistants that act rather than answer. CNET cited Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots among the personal agents that now carry out tasks, and payment companies are building rules for what agents may buy, as in American Express's framework for agent purchases. Yelp's advantage is that it already has the restaurant listings, the reviews and many of the booking systems the agent needs.

What is still unclear

Yelp's release does not say whether the Check for Me agent tells restaurant staff it is an AI, what it does when a call is not answered, or how it handles a restaurant that gives a vague answer such as “it depends”. It also does not say how long Yelp keeps the phone numbers users enter.

There are no accuracy figures for the agent or for the more personalised assistant, and the most interesting features are staged: Check for Me in the coming months, Smart Lead Reply next month, and weekly list-based recommendations next month. OpenTable booking in the assistant is on iOS only for now.

The release fits the direction Yelp has been taking with AI: fewer screens to search, and more tasks handed to an assistant. How well a phone agent copes with a loud host stand on a Friday night will decide whether diners use it more than once.