Yelp Unveils Winter Product Release with Enhanced AI Features
Yelp, the premier business reviews platform, has launched its Winter product release, introducing over 20 new features designed to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities. These updates aim to help businesses connect with more customers and optimize their spending, building upon Yelp’s previous AI advancements that cater to both user and business needs.
This announcement arrives amid a growing interest in artificial intelligence and large language models, which various industries have adopted to upgrade their products and services. Yelp emphasizes its commitment to investing in AI technology and plans to roll out additional features in the coming months.
Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s Chief Product Officer, highlighted the company's focus on enhancing the discovery experience through AI: “We’re doubling down on product updates that utilize our rich, trusted content to foster moments of discovery and inspire meaningful connections. With recent AI advancements, you can expect us to leverage LLMs further to improve user interactions with service providers and support local businesses.”
How is Yelp Using AI?
Yelp’s latest update includes AI-powered summaries for restaurants, food, and nightlife venues. This feature utilizes large language models to deliver concise overviews of what customers can expect from a business, including details on atmosphere, service, amenities, and popular dishes. This innovation helps users overcome decision paralysis, making it easier to find suitable options. The feature is currently available on iOS, with plans for rollout on Android and the web later this year.
Furthermore, Yelp is enhancing its home feed with AI, aiming to help new businesses connect with potential customers more effectively. The updated feed will showcase local businesses, featuring user-shared photos and video content.
Yelp is also advancing its analytics and recommendations through AI, introducing two key updates: an improved Yelp for Business homepage with comprehensive insights on performance, customers, and competitors, and a recommendation system for optimizing advertising budgets.
“The updated performance summary presents a snapshot of a business’s success on Yelp, including impressions, page views, and leads. Customer insights reveal audience data such as popular neighborhoods and trending search terms. Competitor insights provide performance comparisons with similar businesses, detailing page visits over time and identifying top competitors,” Saldanha elaborated.
Additionally, the new ad budgeting tool employs neural networks to analyze factors like business ratings, categories, listing ages, and regional data to recommend advertising strategies that maximize potential return on investment. This feature can be combined with a predictive “Getting Started” component, offering tailored recommendations to drive business success.
Other Notable Features in Yelp’s Winter Release
The Winter release also includes several new features aimed at enhancing the user experience:
- Consultation scheduling for instant support from Yelp.
- Revamped “Projects” functionality for hiring service professionals.
- “Review topics” to assist users in crafting relevant reviews.
- A refreshed visual search experience showcasing popular and recent searches.
“Restaurant and nightlife search results will now emphasize photo-rich listings, bringing businesses to life visually. For frequently searched dishes, new carousels will spotlight popular options. If you’re still undecided, the new ‘People also search for’ feature makes finding alternatives easier by suggesting options like fine dining, trending hotspots, scenic venues, local favorites, and more,” Saldanha concluded.
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