AI-powered photo recognition in Yelp Assistant automatically identifies and understands project needs; response quality badges highlight service pros with helpful replies; and restaurant enhancements, like the Guest Experience Survey, help improve the dining experience

SAN FRANCISCO: Yelp Inc. (NYSE: YELP), the company that connects people with great local businesses, today announced its Spring Product Release, introducing 15 new features and updates that simplify how consumers discover and hire service professionals, and help restaurants manage front-of-house operations. New updates include AI-powered photo recognition in Yelp Assistant to make it easier and quicker to find and connect with the right pros, as well as response quality badges that use large language models (LLMs) to spotlight service pros that provide helpful, informative replies. Yelp is also releasing new tools for Yelp Guest Manager, the company’s comprehensive restaurant front-of-house solution, to provide deeper insights and help hosts manage diner flow more effectively. The new updates include Guest Experience Surveys, enhanced analytics, and a redesigned party management interface. In addition, guaranteed seating areas make it easier for diners to choose where they’ll be seated.

“In this next step of our product transformation, we’re continuing to harness AI to unlock the potential of Yelp’s rich data in ways that build trust and simplify decision-making—whether users are hiring a pro or booking a reservation,” said Craig Saldanha, chief product officer at Yelp. “Our Spring Product Release brings innovative new features to restaurants through enhancements to Yelp Guest Manager. We’re also continuing to double down on our commitment to differentiate the services experience with an even smarter Yelp Assistant that can diagnose a problem from just a photo. And this is just the beginning—we plan to start testing AI-powered call answering services for restaurants and services, so businesses never have to miss a call again.”

Smarter connections with service pros through AI

Yelp continues to enhance the service pro hiring experience by investing in product development that improves efficiency, communication, and lead management. New AI-powered features support more accurate business-matching and streamline communication between consumers and service pros.

• Yelp Assistant photo recognition: Yelp Assistant, the AI chatbot that connects users with service pros, now leverages AI-powered photo recognition to automatically identify the service needed from a user-uploaded photo—such as a broken appliance or landscaping project—ask relevant follow-up questions, and match users with the right pros. This feature is currently available on iOS, with Android and desktop support coming soon.
• AI-powered response quality badges: To highlight service pros who consistently provide helpful, informative replies to project requests, Yelp now displays response quality badges, such as “Excellent,” on eligible business pages and business listings in search results. Using LLMs, Yelp evaluates responses based on several factors, including whether the business provides a quote or availability, acknowledges project details, asks relevant follow-up questions, and goes beyond a generic “call me” reply. Response quality badges are currently displayed across all home, professional, local, auto, pets, event planning, real estate, and financial services categories on iOS and desktop in Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, and Indiana, with nationwide availability to come.
• Yelp Leads API with Zapier simplifies lead management: Yelp is integrating its Leads API with Zapier, enabling businesses to automatically sync leads with more than 800 customer relationship and lead management tools. The Yelp Leads Zapier app allows national services brands to manage leads across locations and more effectively measure ad performance.

“Yelp’s new Zapier integration has been a major improvement for SecureSpace,” said Christian Espinal, marketing director at InSite. “It has significantly streamlined our lead management process, allowing our team to respond to potential customers more efficiently while reducing the internal coordination typically required for lead follow-up. We highly recommend this integration to any business looking to enhance their Request a Quote workflow.”

A smoother dining experience for restaurants and diners

Yelp is introducing new updates to Yelp Guest Manager designed to help restaurant staff improve front-of-house operations and manage diner flow and communication more efficiently. New reservation and waitlist updates also provide diners greater visibility into their seating and table status.

• Guest Experience Survey: Direct diner feedback is critical to running a restaurant—new Guest Experience Surveys make collecting that feedback easier. These short, automated surveys provide daily results in a dedicated dashboard within the Business Owner Account. The dashboard highlights ratings across various aspects of the dining experience, such as food, drinks, and service, along with staff-specific feedback and net promoter scores. The tool supports point of sale integrations for deeper operational insights and is available as an add-on for Yelp Guest Manager Plus and Enterprise customers, with AI-powered analytics coming soon to help surface trends over time.
• Traffic Attribution Dashboard and booking links: To help restaurants better understand guest sources and optimize reservation and waitlist strategies, Yelp Guest Manager now includes an enhanced Traffic Attribution Dashboard that breaks down covers by source, time, and day of the week. Restaurants can also generate custom booking links for social platforms, with traffic from these links tracked directly in the dashboard.
• Redesigned party management and front-of-house tools: Yelp introduced a series of updates to help restaurants manage guest flow and staffing more efficiently. Enhancements include a redesigned party management interface with clearer status indicators and quick actions, automated waitlist removal for unresponsive parties, and new shift scheduling tools such as a calendar view and shift duplication, with multi-section server assignments coming soon.
• Guaranteed seating areas: Diners can now reserve specific seating areas—such as the bar, patio, or dining room—when booking reservations through Yelp, providing more transparency and control over their visit. Restaurants can define and manage these areas in the floor plan editor within the Business Owner Account.

"We used to use physical comment cards, and now that Yelp has an integrated guest feedback system, it has streamlined our operations and made our life easier by keeping everything in an all-in-one portal for easy access,” said Kevin D. Bethyo, vice president of Wildberry Pancakes and Cafe. “We use this as a way to keep our staff progressing and to get valuable feedback on our guest experience to help us make necessary changes to enhance their experience."

Soon, Yelp will begin testing new AI-powered call answering services—one for restaurants and another for services—designed to help businesses stay connected when they’re busy or unavailable. Both call answering services will be fully integrated into Yelp's platform with customizable features and the ability to answer general questions, filter spam, transfer calls when needed, and capture messages. The solution for services will collect project details and intelligently ask relevant follow-up questions to capture detailed leads for pros in their business owner account. The solution for restaurants will book reservations, add guests to the waitlist, and seamlessly integrate into Yelp Guest Manager, with access to call analytics.

Additional Information and Assets

For more details on all of the latest updates from Yelp’s Spring Product Release, visit the company's blog post. Assets and images are available here. For further information about Yelp, visit the company’s Fast Facts page.

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.

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, which 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.

Fonte: Business Wire