SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yelp Inc. (NYSE:YELP), the company that connects people with great local businesses, today is announcing its Winter Product Release with more than 20 new features that elevate the Yelp experience for both consumers and business owners. The company is releasing new AI-powered business summaries that make it even easier for people to find a business that fits their needs at a glance and new Recognitions celebrate and distinguish reviewers who are passionate about a specific food, cuisine or nightlife category. A new AI-powered visual home feed and updated search experience enhance discovery, helping consumers quickly and easily find their new favorite restaurant. While new updates to the services experience, including enhancements to Request a Quote and new 'Projects' features, help simplify finding the right service professional for their needs. Lastly, new data-driven features for business owners and advertisers on the Yelp for Business experience surface unique insights that help them grow and succeed on Yelp.
“We’re continuing to enhance the search and discovery experience for consumers on Yelp, as well as unlock more value for business owners,” said Craig Saldanha, chief product officer at Yelp. “These new features harness our rich, trusted content to inspire even more meaningful connections across the platform, from supporting the contributors who make Yelp the one-stop local platform we are today to helping local businesses and service professionals thrive in their communities. Rolling out features that make life easier, delight our users and leverage advanced technology allow us to deliver a seamless consumer experience and more effectively match businesses with valuable leads.”
Enhancing the business discovery and review experience on Yelp
In 2023, tens of millions of reviews, photos and videos were contributed to Yelp. With its commitment to delivering helpful and reliable content, the platform continues to build new features to engage users and inspire them to contribute high-quality content.
- New AI-powered home feed: Yelp’s new home feed experience on iOS uses AI to help consumers discover new businesses in their community — surfacing relevant user photos, Collections from Yelp Elites and video content from nearby businesses. In the coming months, the homepage will also feature user videos and roll out on Android.
- A more visual iOS search experience: New updates throughout the Yelp search journey create a more visual and engaging experience for consumers. From the beginning of the search experience, a new suggestions page highlights popular and recent searches. For restaurant, food and nightlife searches, users will find more visual, photo-heavy business listings, a new “People also search for” component that helps users narrow down their choices with search recommendations and new carousels that highlight user photos of popular dishes for frequently searched foods. This new search experience will be available on Android later this year.
- AI-powered business summaries: Yelp is using LLMs to parse recent reviews and surface unique descriptions about restaurant, food and nightlife businesses at the top of the business page — highlighting elements such as the atmosphere, service, amenities, value, or a popular dish. Business summaries will roll out to Yelp’s Android app and website later this year.
- Recognitions: To celebrate Yelp's engaged contributors, users can now earn Recognitions for writing reviews in more than 165 restaurants, food and nightlife categories — including tacos, cocktails, coffee and more. Recognitions are earned for writing at least three reviews within a year for businesses within the same select category and are featured in the ‘Achievements’ section on the ‘Me Tab’ in the Yelp iOS app. Additional categories and platforms will roll out later this year.
- More review topics: To alleviate writer’s block when users are drafting a review, Yelp is expanding its interactive review topics to new categories across home, local, professional and auto services, as well as beauty, shopping, health and medical. Review topics light up green when common themes are covered in reviews to remind reviewers of helpful details that other people would want to know about.
Streamlining the services experience and connecting people with pros faster
Yelp continues to release new features that reduce friction for consumers when hiring services pros, further solidifying the platform as a destination for services. With millions of projects started on Yelp every year, the company’s latest updates make it easier and more seamless to confidently find and hire service professionals.
- New ‘Projects’ features: Yelp is adding a series of new features to the ‘Projects’ experience to simplify hiring service professionals, including the ability to upload videos and provide documentation for projects, archive old projects, send quick replies with one-click responses and more. Consumers can also opt-in to receive SMS messages directly from businesses to help coordinate and complete their projects without having to open the Yelp app or log into their account.
- Streamlined Request a Quote experience: An improved Request a Quote experience for consumers helps facilitate more efficient communication with service pros and drive more high-quality leads to business owners. Consumers can find updated questions based on a business’s unique services, as well as pre-filled and skippable questions based on their search.
- Yelp Guaranteed expands nationwide: The company’s satisfaction guarantee program, Yelp Guaranteed, is available nationwide, allowing people to get up to $2,500 back in the event something goes wrong with their project.
- Phone leads for service pros: To make it easier to book a job or schedule an appointment, businesses with Request a Quote enabled can directly call or text potential customers that opt into being contacted directly by the business. To protect user privacy, businesses will receive a masked temporary phone number and users can opt out at any time.
Revamping the Yelp for Business experience
Yelp is rolling out new product enhancements that provide valuable insights to businesses, helping them make strategic and informed decisions to better reach relevant consumers and grow their business.
- New data-driven insights for business owners: The Yelp for Business homepage now features enhanced business page performance metrics, as well as unique customer and competitor insights. This includes data on the neighborhoods where the most consumers are searching for the services they offer, trending search terms in their area, performance comparisons to similar businesses and more.
- Enhanced onboarding experience with AI-driven insights: Yelp is revamping the experience for new advertisers with a new “Getting Started” section, a redesigned business Q&A section and enhanced smart budget recommendations. AI-powered smart budgets leverage neural networks to provide helpful advertising budget recommendations that help business owners select the advertising option with the highest potential ROI.
- Scheduling consultations: Yelp advertisers can more seamlessly get in touch with and schedule consultations with the company’s customer service team, when it’s most convenient for them, without needing to hold for a representative.
Additional Information and Assets
Learn more about all of the latest updates Yelp is announcing in a blog post and a video overview from Saldanha. Assets and images can be found here. For more information about Yelp, visit the company’s Fast Facts page.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to, among other things, Yelp’s future product plans, including the ability of its investments and initiatives to drive profitable long-term growth and shareholder value, that are based on its current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties.
Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences also include, but are not limited to, those factors that could affect Yelp’s business, operating results and stock price included under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in Yelp’s most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K or Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q at yelp-ir.com or the SEC’s website at sec.gov.
About Yelp Inc.
Yelp Inc. (yelp.com) is a community-driven platform that connects people with great local businesses. Millions of people rely on Yelp for useful and trusted local business information, reviews and photos to help inform their spending decisions. As a one-stop local platform, Yelp helps consumers easily discover, connect and transact with businesses across a broad range of categories by making it easy to request a quote for a service, book a table at a restaurant and more. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in 2004.
