diff --git a/spacy/cli/evaluate.py b/spacy/cli/evaluate.py
index 3467204b9..09db389c4 100644
--- a/spacy/cli/evaluate.py
+++ b/spacy/cli/evaluate.py
@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ def evaluate_cli(
 def evaluate(
     model: str,
     data_path: Path,
-    output: Optional[Path],
+    output: Optional[Path] = None,
     gpu_id: int = -1,
     gold_preproc: bool = False,
     displacy_path: Optional[Path] = None,