Yelp is improving its search and review functionality with a number of features based on two of-the-moment internet technologies: artificial intelligence and short-form video. It’s part of the online review platform’s “most significant update in recent years,” according to the company.
“Right now is a really exciting time for us, because we just see low-hanging fruit everywhere,” says Yelp cofounder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman of the company’s work with large language model-based AI. “We have really trusted, unique content from consumers: millions and millions of reviewed local businesses, and if there’s one thing LLMs are good at, it’s summarizing and understanding content.”
Users often turn to Yelp simply to find nearby goods and services, but they occasionally also turn to the platform to search for and review faraway businesses, such as when they’re planning vacations—or when they’re back from a trip and looking to review spots they visited while out of town. Now, as users type, Yelp’s AI will attempt to intelligently determine whether they’re looking for a place around the corner or across the country—for example, if they enter the name of a celebrated restaurant in another town—as it suggests relevant results, without users needing to specify the name of a city.
“It’s smart enough to know that I’m actually looking for something very specific further away,” says Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, VP of consumer product at Yelp.
Yelp’s search engine will also use LLMs to better surface relevant review snippets in results, making it easier for users to figure out which businesses meet their needs without having to click or tap through to full reviews. In demonstrating the tool, Yelp shows a user who types in “tennis courts” into the text box and is then fed information about tennis facilities at nearby parks, or searches for “pixie cuts” and finds out details about hair salons offering the style, pulled from Yelp’s ever-growing database of reviews. The review snippets themselves aren’t a new feature, but Kuduvalli says the feature has been “supercharged” by the use of the new AI trained on Yelp data.
“Yelp’s big differentiator has always been its rich and broad set of customer reviews, and LLMs really allow us to harness the power of those reviews,” says Craig Saldanha, the company’s chief product officer. “Consumers have always had access to them, but LLMs allow us at speed and at scale to parse such vast amounts of data and essentially infer and succinctly summarize very compelling insights and to do that in a way that feels both personal as well as precise.”
Once Yelp results do pop up in certain categories including restaurants and nightlife, they’ll be marked with clickable category tags— like “cafés,” “seafood,” or “Mexican”—that users can tap to find other businesses in the same categories without having to go back to the search box. On individual restaurant and nightlife business pages, a new navigation bar makes it quicker to jump to particular sections of a listing, like the menu, photos, or, of course, the reviews. Yelp has also added AI-powered photo categorization to make it easier to find relevant images on business pages and a sort feature that can help find more recently posted pictures.