Yelp uses AI to streamline reviews and compete with Google

The news: Yelp added AI-powered filters to boost user-facing tools, including a review summary tool called Review Insights.

• The new tool uses large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI to aggregate users’ sentiments on a business’s food quality, wait times, service quality, and other common feedback factors.
• The insights appear within a clickable module on a page’s review section, disseminating users’ scores on a scale from 1 to 100. Customers can see a breakdown of positive, neutral, and negative reviews for each feedback category.

Yelp also introduced a conversational AI-powered Yelp Assistant, which can answer questions on local businesses and help users decide on what establishment to visit.

Zooming out: Yelp has a passionate user base, many of whom regularly contribute in-depth reviews on businesses and collect badges for engagement activity.

• The review and social platform has more than 287 million reviews, making it easy for users to get overwhelmed by the volume of comments.
• Giving users an easily digestible module for result summaries can help make Yelp a more effective research tool.

The same strategy for improving search functionality and making answers more readily available was adopted by Reddit this week, when it launched an AI-powered conversational chatbot called Reddit Answers.

Competition in the field: Yelp’s Review Insights offer a summary similar to Google’s AI Overviews by giving consumers a consolidated view of the information they’re looking for.

Google is perhaps Yelp’s biggest competitor, and the companies have a fraught relationship.

• In August, Yelp filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing it of monopolizing local search services, prioritizing its own offerings, and lowering the quality of search results for consumers.
• 16% of US adults say they’ve used Yelp to look up information about local businesses, per SOCi, compared with 72% for Google Search.

Our take: Streamlining a wealth of results into a single chart could oversimplify the review experience and drop the amount of time users spend on Yelp. Adding a summary of positive and negative reviews could help users get more specific information from the insights and ensure the tool doesn’t reduce engagement by giving answers away too quickly.

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