Yelp Launches End-of-Year Updates

Yelp has launched its end-of-year product release featuring more than 20 updates that enhance the user experience for both consumers and business owners. These include artificial intelligence-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 new features across the home feed and business pages include the following:

• AI-powered Review Insights for restaurant, food, and nightlife businesses, which 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 business' reviews as aggregated sentiment scores ranging from 1 to 100. Users can also explore related reviews for each topic.
• Personalized home feed, with updates to help consumers better discover new and relevant businesses. The home feed now features new content types, such as user videos, reviews, trending searches, hot and new businesses, and more.
• More Recognitions in more places, helping users identify when reviews are written by passionate contributors. 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 that inform users about establishments' tipping and payment policies.

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

• Enhanced Yelp Assistant, which refines communication with project editing and broadcasting. This tool supports text and call requests from service pros on iOS, while masking consumers' phone numbers 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 helps users edit and automatically relay revised project details to multiple services pros at once for quotes.
• Request a Quote integration on 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 that will help manage leads with redesigned job cards that feature AI-powered summaries, highlighting crucial job information.

New features to better streamline ad setup and strengthen ad performance include the following:

• Smart selection, which helps Yelp advertisers automatically test the best reviews and photos to showcase, optimizing their ads for the highest return on ad spend.
• New competitive insights and enhanced support, which allows business owners to compare their Yelp page performance with up to three competitors. Additionally, Yelp's ??new ad budget options allow seasonal advertisers to temporarily reduce their ad spend with automatic restarts when it's most convenient.

"This year has been marked by an accelerated pace of product innovation at Yelp," said Craig Saldanha, chief product officer of Yelp, in a statement. "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."