Dive Brief:
- Yelp has updated its product suite with over 20 features, impacting both consumers and businesses, the company said in a Tuesday blog post.
- The new features include the addition of review insights generated by large language models, more personalized home feeds and eight new tipping policy and payment business attributes, the company said.
- Yelp began using large language models to improve the relevance of its search results in 2023 and added large language model generated business summaries and enhanced home feeds in January.
Dive Insight:
Yelp’s added features could drive more searches and consumer usage, which would help the company as its restaurant, retail and other categories division has struggled to grow revenue. That division’s revenue was down by 6% year over year to $116 million during the third quarter. Advertising spend has been down as a result of struggles in the industry, executives said in a November earnings call.
Review insights will use a large language model to evaluate review sentiments on aspects like food quality, service and ambiance. Insights are displayed as an aggregated sentiment score either positive, neutral or critical, and range from 1 to 100 for each topic. This feature is currently available on iOS for restaurant, food and nightlife, Yelp said.
The product updates are intended to simplify the process of setting up ads on the platform and strengthen their performance, the company said. These features include smart selection, which tests the reviews and photos available to a restaurant to determine optimal use of ads and drive higher return on ad spend. The feature is available to all advertisers.
Business owners also will have access to competitive insights, which will allow businesses to assess their page performance against others. Businesses can compare themselves to up to three competitors on their dashboards. Yelp added the option for businesses to reduce their ad spend during seasonal shifts with automatic restarts. The company also updated its support center with tailored content such as advertising status.
On the consumer-facing side, businesses can now add eight new tipping policies and business attributes. They can explain their tipping policies as optional, mandatory or not accepted and disclose if there’s a credit card processing fee, among other attributes, the company said.
Yelp also updated its iOS platform with personalized home feeds that will now feature content like autoplay user videos, user reviews, trending searches and popular businesses, with the goal of increasing discoverability of new local businesses. Users will also see trending searches during the search process to help identify popular user queries in a consumer’s area.
