Yelp Unveils a Series of New AI-powered Features to Enhance Discovery and Connection with Local Businesses

AI-powered Review Insights and new tipping attributes help consumers learn more about local businesses before they go; enhancements to Yelp Assistant and Yelp’s Request a Quote in Apple Maps make it even easier to connect with pros and complete projects; AI-enabled smart selection automatically optimize ads for business owners for the highest return on ad spend

Yelp Inc. , the company that connects people with great local businesses,  announced its end-of-year product release featuring more than 20 new updates designed to enhance the user experience for both consumers and business owners. Yelp’s latest product release includes AI-driven features, such as Review Insights that surface reviewer sentiment for common topics, a personalized home feed with even more user content, and enhancements to Yelp Assistant, the AI chatbot that connects consumers with service pros. Yelp also announced AI-powered improvements to the business owner experience with features like job summaries that help manage their inbox and a smart selection tool that automatically optimizes ad performance.

Yelp’s End-of-Year Product Release unveils more than 20 new updates, including AI-powered Review Insights, enhanced ways to connect with service pros, and optimized ad set-up for business owners.

“This year has been marked by an accelerated pace of product innovation at Yelp,” said Craig Saldanha, chief product officer at Yelp. “By using AI to harness Yelp’s vast amount of trusted user-generated content, in 2024 we’ve rolled out more than 80 new features that enhance the consumer and business owner experience. Our end-of-year product release highlights how Yelp is simplifying the way users discover and connect with local businesses with new AI-powered features like Review Insights that provide a shortcut to the information consumers care about most. We’re looking forward to continuing this momentum into the new year, with even more updates for consumers and business owners to come.”

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AI-enhanced local business discovery

Yelp introduced new and improved ways to discover, learn about, and connect with local businesses with new features across the home feed and business pages on Yelp.

• AI-powered Review Insights: New Review Insights use large language models to analyze and summarize reviewer sentiment on various aspects of a business, such as food quality, service, and ambiance. Insights are displayed above a business’s reviews as aggregated sentiment scores for each topic—positive, neutral, and critical—ranging from 1 to 100. Users can also explore related reviews for each topic. Review Insights are available on iOS for restaurant, food, and nightlife businesses.
• Personalized home feed: New updates to Yelp’s home feed on iOS help consumers better discover new and relevant businesses. The home feed now features new content types, such as user videos, reviews, trending searches, hot & new businesses, and more. In the coming weeks, Yelp will roll out an AI-powered update that better tailors a user’s home feed to their preferences.
• More Recognitions in more places: Consumers can now find a user’s Recognitions alongside their reviews on business pages, helping users identify when reviews are written by passionate contributors in business categories they’re interested in. Recognitions have also expanded to include 220 additional home services, beauty, and active life categories and are available on iOS and desktop with Android coming early next year.
• Tipping business attributes: To provide transparency around tipping, Yelp introduced eight new business attributes that inform users about an establishment’s tipping and payment policies. New attributes include whether the business has a “no tipping” policy, if tipping is optional, if gratuity is automatically applied to the bill, and more.

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Streamlined hiring experience for consumers and service pros

Leveraging AI, Yelp enhanced the services experience to simplify connections between consumers and service pros.

• Enhanced Yelp Assistant refines pro communication with project editing and broadcasting: Yelp Assistant, an AI chatbot that connects you with pros, now supports text and call requests from service pros on iOS, while masking the consumer’s phone number for their privacy. Users can also find Yelp Assistant through new conversational prompts on search results pages on iOS in addition to the Projects tab across all platforms. Additionally, new project editing and broadcasting makes it easy to edit and automatically relay revised project details to multiple services pros at once for the most accurate quotes.
• Request a Quote integration on Apple Maps: Yelp’s Request a Quote is now integrated with Apple Maps, allowing users to request quotes from local professionals across home, local, auto, professional, and events categories. Consumers can find a new “Quote” button on Apple Maps business pages, which directs them to Request a Quote for that business in the Yelp iOS app.
• AI-enhanced business owner inbox: In the coming weeks, service professionals will have an enhanced inbox that will help them manage leads more efficiently with redesigned job cards that feature AI-powered summaries, highlighting crucial job information for easy evaluation.

Simplified ad setup and optimization for business owners

Continuing its commitment to helping business owners grow and succeed, Yelp introduced new features to better streamline ad setup and strengthen ad performance.

• Smart selection: The new AI-powered smart selection helps Yelp advertisers automatically test the best reviews and photos to showcase, optimizing their ads for the highest return on ad spend. This free feature is available to all Yelp advertisers.
• New competitive insights and enhanced support: A new competitor measurement tool on the Yelp for Business homepage allows business owners to compare their Yelp page performance with up to three competitors of their choice, helping better inform their growth strategies. Additionally, Yelp’s ​​new ad budget options allow seasonal advertisers to temporarily reduce their ad spend with automatic restarts whenever it’s most convenient to them.