Yelp Adds AI-Powered Insights to Its Business Reviews

Online business directory Yelp has debuted several new features, including AI-powered insights to its reviews.

“This year has been marked by an accelerated pace of product innovation at Yelp,” Craig Saldanha, chief product officer at Yelp, said in a news release Tuesday (Dec. 10). “By using AI to harness Yelp’s vast amount of trusted user-generated content, in 2024 we’ve rolled out more than 80 new features that enhance the consumer and business owner experience.”

According to the release, the company’s Review Insights feature uses artificial intelligence (AI)-powered large language models to analyze and summarize reviewer sentiment on a range of aspects of a business, like food quality, service and ambiance.

These insights appear above a business’s reviews as “aggregated sentiment scores” for each topic — positive, neutral and critical — ranging from 1 to 100. Yelp users can also browse related reviews for each topic.

Other recently-introduced features include updates to Yelp’s home feed on iOS help consumers better discover new and relevant businesses. The home feed now features new content types, such as user videos, reviews, trending searches, new and popular businesses, and more.

“In the coming weeks, Yelp will roll out an AI-powered update that better tailors a user’s home feed to their preferences,” the release said.

In addition, Yelp — in the interest of providing “transparency around tipping” — has introduced eight new “business attributes” that let users know about an establishment’s tipping and payment policies, including things like whether the business has a “no tipping” policy, if tipping is optional, or if a gratuity is automatically applied to the bill.

Yelp began adding AI-powered business summaries at the start of this year. As PYMNTS reported in August, the company’s AI offerings have helped the company’s revenues grow in the face of a challenging economic environment.

In related news, Reddit earlier this week launched a test of an AI-powered conversational interface designed to answer questions by offering information and recommendations based on conversations and communities across its platform.

As noted here in May, AI-powered search offerings are transforming the way people search the web and shop online, making the experience more personalized and intuitive.

“By leveraging natural language processing, machine learning and user data, AI search tools can deeply understand complex queries and deliver tailored results and recommendations,” PYMNTS wrote.