Yelp Introduces AI-Powered Summaries and Revamped Home Feed
Yelp, the leading business reviews platform, has recently unveiled its Winter product release, featuring over 20 new additions that enhance its artificial intelligence capabilities. These new features aim to help businesses reach a wider customer base and optimize their spending. This release builds upon Yelp’s previous AI innovations, which focused on addressing user and business needs.
The introduction of these new features comes at a time of heightened interest in artificial intelligence and large language models, which have been adopted by various industries and brands, including Yelp. By leveraging AI, Yelp aims to improve its products and services to provide a better experience to its users and support local businesses. The company has also expressed its commitment to further invest in AI technology and develop more features in the future.
“We’re continuing to double down on new product updates that harness our rich, trusted content to elevate moments of discovery and inspire even more meaningful connections. With recent advancements in AI, you can expect to see us further leverage LLMs to ease the discovery experience, facilitate more seamless connections with service providers and help local businesses succeed,” says Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s chief product officer.
In the Winter product release, Yelp introduces AI-powered summaries for restaurant, food, and nightlife businesses. These summaries utilize large language models to provide consumers with concise information about what to expect from a business. By analyzing recent user reviews, Yelp’s AI identifies the key attributes of a business, such as its atmosphere, service, amenities, value, or popular dishes. This summary feature enables customers to make quick and informed decisions when choosing a business.
The AI-powered summaries are currently available on iOS and are expected to be rolled out on Android and the web later this year.
Alongside the summaries, Yelp is also enhancing its home feed with AI to help businesses, especially those newly joining the platform, connect with potential customers more effectively and grow their business. The revamped home feed will utilize AI to showcase new businesses in a user’s community, with relevant photos shared by other users and video content.
Analytical Insights and Recommendation Tool for Business Growth
In addition to the AI-powered summaries and revamped home feed, Yelp is strengthening its analytical and recommendation capabilities with AI. This includes the introduction of a revamped Yelp for Business homepage that provides detailed insights into business performance, customers, and competitors. It also offers recommendations on the optimal advertising budget for businesses.
“The updated performance summary highlights a snapshot of a business’s success on Yelp, such as the number of impressions, page views, and leads a business has received. Customer insights detail audience data like what neighborhoods have the most consumers searching for the services they offer and the trending search terms in their area. New competitor insights provide performance comparisons detailing page visits over time compared to similar businesses, and the names of highly-viewed competitors,” explains Craig Saldanha.
To assist businesses in budgeting their advertising efforts effectively, Yelp has developed an ad budgeting tool that utilizes neural networks to consider various business factors, such as rating, category, listing age, and region. This tool provides advertising options that can potentially yield the highest return on investment. Furthermore, businesses can also benefit from the predictive “Getting Started” feature, which offers tailored recommendations to increase the success of their listings.
In addition to these AI-powered tools, Yelp’s Winter release includes various other features such as consultation scheduling, an enhanced “Projects” experience for hiring service professionals, “review topics” to assist in drafting relevant reviews, and a revamped visual search experience highlighting popular and recent searches.
“Search results for restaurants, food, and nightlife businesses will now feature photo-heavy search results listings, visually bringing businesses to life. For frequently searched foods, you’ll find new carousels that highlight popular dishes. If you still can’t settle on the right business, the new ‘People also search for’ component in search results helps narrow down your choices with search recommendations for fine dining, hottest restaurants, restaurants with views, local favorites, and more,” adds Craig Saldanha.
