Yelp today has announced several new features to uplevel its functionality across the board. The whopping 20 new features and updates include formal recognition for power reviewers, a new user-facing feed for content discovery, request-a-quote improvements, and business-facing insights.
Before going into details, the common thread is what you’d expect these days: AI. Yelp, like many tech & media players, is in the process of applying the latest flavors of AI to its product mix. In the aggregate, this is often split between thoughtful infusions, and tech-for-tech sake ad-ons to get a PR lift.
Yelp’s moves here appear to be in the former camp, with several functional upgrades that make sense. As it’s done in the past with these multi-dimensional product updates, there’s a solid mix of user-facing and merchant-facing functions. Connecting these two camps traces back to Yelp’s mission.
“We’re continuing to enhance the search and discovery experience on Yelp as well as unlock more value for business owners,” Chief Product Officer Craig Saldanha told Localogy Insider. “These new features harness our rich, trusted content to inspire even more meaningful connections across the platform.”
Highlight Reel
Going deeper into these new features, here’s a representative sample. Think of it like a highlight reel that we’ve extracted from the announcement to save you time.
AI-powered business summaries
New business summaries are fueled by large language models to parse reviews and summarize the main takeaways (think: dishes a restaurant is most known for). These new summaries will sit at the top of business pages, starting in the restaurant, food, and nightlife categories.
Enhanced review experience and recognition of power users
Yelp will make it easier to write reviews, including more review topics. These topics serve as a sort of template for those intimidated by writing reviews. Additionally, Yelp will roll out “recognitions” which are sort of like Foursquare badges in 165 categories like “brunch” and “burgers.”
Visual discovery
Photos and videos play a big role in getting users to discover new things on Yelp. To that end, it will roll out more visuals in search results, and an AI-powered home feed that highlights visual content deemed relevant to a given user. Think of this like an Instagram feed for your Yelp home page.
Streamlining home project management
Yelp has upgraded the “projects” experience including streamlined ways to request quote. There’s also a redesigned project area – the jumping-off point for any projects underway – such as easier photo uploads. This can become the central place to manage varied and complex home projects.
Business-Facing Insights
Yelp is deploying AI as a strategy co-pilot for SMBs. This takes form in insights such as competitive performance data for benchmarking, and budget recommendations. There are also tools that help business planning such as exposing what neighborhoods search most for a given service.
Evolutionary Arc
All the above comes as Yelp approaches its 20-year anniversary. We haven’t seen much fanfare around this but, doing the math, the company launched around July 2004. It’s come a long way since then, up to and including today’s announcement. That timeline also includes milestones like going public in 2012.
Looking back on other evolutions in that lifecycle, Yelp was one of the first local media & advertising players to expand into operational functions. In other words, it (and others that followed) expanded from SMB marketing and customer acquisition to things like appointment scheduling and requesting quotes.
This was a big move in the local commerce sector because it allowed players that erstwhile focused on marketing and advertising to bring more dimension to their businesses. This not only diversified revenue and offered new growth pathways, but did so with features and functions that fit together nicely.
These broader buckets can be seen in today’s updates and we expect them to continue developing. That evolutionary arc will sustain, the only variable being executional nuances and emerging tech integrations. The latter is all about AI these days, so that will be the name of the game for the near future.
