Yelp enhances consumer experience with new discovery, review and services features

By leveraging LLMs, Yelp can better understand the nuance in your search intent and highlight relevant information from reviews in new snippets that appear under each business listing in your search results. For example, when you search for “tennis courts” on Yelp, in addition to the list of parks and sports facilities that appear in your search results, you will also now see helpful review highlights about tennis courts under each park or facility listed, such as “there are tennis courts that you need to book in advance.”

We’re using AI to provide better search suggestions based on your search intent that are not bound by your location – helping you make plans for the future when you’re not looking for businesses near home, or go back to review a business you visited on a recent trip. Yelp now suggests businesses that you may be looking for across the U.S., streamlining the discovery experience for when you already have a specific business in mind.

When you’re having a tough time deciding where to eat, Yelp’s new Surprise Me feature combats analysis paralysis with restaurant selection. An easy click on the red “Surprise me” button, found on the Yelp home feed and search results, will generate a unique highly-rated recommendation near you. If the first recommendation isn’t for you, hit “Surprise me again” for a new suggestion. More than one million businesses have already been suggested every month through this new feature.

If you’re still not sure where to eat, clickable category tags on business listings for restaurants, food and nightlife searches, help you better refine your search and connect with the right business.

Videos are a great way to capture and share your experiences — whether it’s of a steaming bowl of ramen, a new hike you discovered in your local park, or the view from a recent hotel stay. To provide a unique inside look into your experience with the business, you’ll be able post high-resolution video up to 12 seconds alongside your text review and photos.

We know that sometimes you may develop writer’s block when crafting reviews. To remind you what made your experience great when reviewing restaurant, food and nightlife businesses, we’re rolling out new interactive review topics – “food,” “service” and “ambiance” – that help you track what you’ve covered, and remind you of other topics you might want to address. Once a topic is addressed it will automatically turn green with a checkmark at the top of your draft review. In the coming months, we plan to expand relevant review topics to even more categories, such as services, beauty, health and shopping. 

For many of you in our community, the “Useful,” “Funny” and “Cool” review reactions have become synonymous with Yelp over the past 15 years. The time has come to introduce more expressive ways to appreciate Yelpers for their reviews with new “Helpful,” “Thanks,” “Love this” and “Oh no” reactions. We’ve already seen over six times more reactions to reviews with these new expressive reactions. To make sure you aren’t losing any of the previous engagement with your reviews, “Useful” reactions will now count towards “Helpful,” and “Funny” or “Cool” reactions will count towards “Love this.”

Yelp Connect is a paid feature that allows business owners to share important updates directly with consumers. We’re now empowering businesses to upload videos to their Connect posts, giving you more engaging content from the business — from a weekly deal, to special menu items, to upcoming events and more.

A new navigation bar on restaurant, food and nightlife business pages makes it easy for you to more efficiently find the information you’re looking for by jumping directly to a business’s menu, amenities, reviews, or other helpful information. We’ve also redesigned the photo viewing experience on business pages by introducing AI-driven photo categories for food and nightlife businesses, as well as a new sort feature that enables people to quickly see recently added photos. These updates allow you to easily find photos based on what you’re most interested in – such as the most recent menu photo and the different types of cuisines or dishes a restaurant has to offer. Relatedly, we’ve updated the look and feel of business photos on desktop with a new infinite vertical scrolling feature so you can easily view all the photos for a business.

The refreshed home feed now surfaces even more helpful information about local businesses near you, including the total review count of a business, how many other reviewers mentioned a Popular Dish in a positive review, the price of a menu item, your distance from a business and more. We plan to bring even more helpful information and visual contributions, including video, to the home feed this year.

We’re rolling out a new login experience that won’t require you to remember your password every time you want to log into your account. Now, when you’re logging into Yelp, you will receive a unique email link that seamlessly and securely authenticates with just one click. This allows you to automatically sign in to submit your requests for quotes, create Collections, join a waitlist and more.