Yelp just launched 35+ new features and its AI Assistant is now moving into the critical path of local search, recommendations, and bookings. For SMBs, that changes the rules of visibility and conversion.
Yelp this week announced its Spring product release. This comes every year with a treasure trove of updates across Yelp’s products and functions. This year’s theme is unsurprisingly AI, including user-facing features to find local businesses, and SMB-facing features for automated task completion.
The centerpiece of these updates is a new and improved Yelp AI Assistant. First launched in 2024’s Spring Update, it lets users state a local need in natural language to get pointed to the right local businesses. This week’s refresh infuses the latest underlying AI capabilities and a broader range of capabilities.
For example, Yelp Assistant has more surface area across Yelp. It can better process and answer natural language queries that are complex and nuanced. Users can ask for things like the best places to hike with a dog off-leash, or to throw a birthday party for a nine-year-old. This can better capture user intent.
“The gap between consumer intent and a booked job is where you’re winning or losing customers,” Yelp VP of Product Nicole Lund told Localogy. “Yelp Consumers now expect to move from searching to booking within minutes, but most businesses are still losing leads to phone tag, slow follow-ups, and disconnected tools.”
Assistance + Actionability
As is quickly becoming a standard in AI search, Yelp Assistant also now has a better memory. Users can ask multi-part questions, a la Google AI Mode, that build on each other like a human conversation. In the above birthday example, a user could follow up about prices, food allergies, parking, and accessibility.
But more to Lund’s point, one of the hallmarks of the new & improved Yelp Assistant is its actionability. In other words, chats are highly linked to Yelp profiles or other action-oriented mechanisms like Request a Quote. It’s also opening the door to a broader range of action-oriented tie-ins from third-party apps.
These integrations include food ordering (DoorDash and Grubhub), fitness and beauty appointments (Vagaro), healthcare appointments (Zocdoc), and car repair (RepairPal). True to Assistant’s one-stop-shop goals these can each be accessed from within the chat, so users don’t have to go anywhere else.
“Everything we’re introducing is about recommending businesses at exactly the right moment, to exactly the right customer,” said Lund, “from the new Yelp Assistant that brings the entire discovery-to-booking journey into a single conversation, to new and enhanced integrations with Calendly, Vagaro, RepairPal, and Zocdoc that drive more consumer bookings directly into the systems businesses already trust and use.”
New Hot Thing
But the biggest piece of subtext that jumps out from Yelp’s moves with Assistant is how well it will be positioned from a model training standpoint. As we’ve examined, reviews are the new golden goose for LLMs (along with Reddit) to answer complex questions, given their depth and breadth of sentiment data.
In Yelp’s case, it can tap into all of that knowledge in its model training… and do so in a first-party way. Just as we’ve always said that Google will have an edge in model training due to an extensive knowledge graph, Yelp maintains an edge when it comes to vast intelligence for local business sentiment.
Regarding the “more surface area,” noted above, Assistant will be planted in a new tab in Yelp’s iOS and Android apps, so it has its own place to live and develop user habits. The tab will be placed in the center of the bottom navigation bar, so it’s front & center. Yelp will roll out Assistant in more places this year.
As for the rest of the 35 updates in Yelp’s Spring update, they include visual search and other AI-powered search capabilities for users. For SMBs, updates include AI-powered media tagging and more robust analytics in the Yelp for Business App. You can see the full slate of updates in the Spring Release.
