• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 31, 2024

Yelp has expanded its use of artificial intelligence in the latest rollout of new features on iOS that aggregate and summarize user reviews on restaurants, food, and nightlife business pages.

The summary appears near the top of a company’s page.

A revised visual home feed, search experience and AI-powered business summaries aim to improve discovery of products and services, and provides updates to its services features make it easier for companies to hire professionals.

"Yelp has been using AI and machine learning to enhance the user experience and speed up search and ranking for many years now, but recent advances in AI, such as LLMs allow us to understand users’ queries faster and with more accuracy, as well as serve users the most relevant ads,” says Yelp CTO Sam Eaton.

The new feature uses large language models (LLMs) to parse through user feedback and highlight the best business factors based on firsthand reviews. This may include a mention of a location’s atmosphere, popular dishes, or amenities.

Amazon has done something similar, using AI to summarize a product review, suggesting pros and cons based on user opinion.

Visual prompts take on a more important role, and several other features have been added to its iOS app.

A revised home feed now relies on AI to serve specialized content and photos related to local businesses. Search on iOS brings in more photos on the results page, such as carousels that highlight foods that are frequently searched for by users.

Business owners now have access to a tool that Yelp calls “AI-powered smart budgets” to provide useful recommendations to optimize ad spend.

Neural networks suggest different daily advertising budgets that should produce an estimated number of clicks by recommending a budget based on similar businesses. 

These take into account rating, category, listing age, region and more, and will then suggest advertising options with the highest potential return on investment (ROI). 

The tool pairs with a predictive Getting Started recommendations feature from Yelp. The technology identifies the steps that will be most likely to drive success for the business listing.

Yelp has also revised its Request a Quote process to help business owners find higher-quality leads, while updated Projects functions for consumers. The goal of these features is to help business owners quickly get the information they need, including videos and quick replies that help them close leads faster.