Business search site YellowPages.com announced Wednesday that America Online will include its listings on AOL Yellow Pages, the New York Times reports. Phone companies SBC Communications and BellSouth, which bought YellowPages.com last year, hope to gain more exposure for YellowPages.com listings and make their website more attractive to advertisers. Advertising is one of the fastest-growing and most profitable businesses for phone companies. SBC and BellSouth have 4,000 sales representatives in 22 states to sell ads for their websites and Yellow Pages books.

SBC and BellSouth have been expanding their online advertising businesses to meet the demand for web-based directories. The companies, which also have alliances with Google and Yahoo, expect 70 million searches a month for YellowPages.com listings after their partnership with AOL begins.

According to comScore, 4.17 million unique viewers visited YellowPages.com in April, 69 percent more than the same month in 2004. During that same period, the number of unique visitors at AOL Yellow Pages declined 51 percent, to 2.1 million.