In all the recent scrambling to integrate AI tools across the tech & media landscape, we often forget that several players have already been doing so for years. Yelp is one of those companies, including its XGBoost, various flavors of neural networks and – more recently – large language models.
The company has added to that list this week with expanded use of neural networks for a variety of core features across the site. Those include search results, ad matching, Yelp Waitlist, and photo classification (more on those below). These tools span user-facing and SMB-facing functions.
“Neural networks are a key part of Yelp’s AI toolkit,” Yelp CTO Sam Eaton told Localogy Insider.” Being able to extract complex features from vast amounts of raw data – like review text and photos – allows us to better understand the needs of users and businesses, producing better outcomes for both.”
Diving deeper into the latest Yelp AI integrations, they include…
- Ad systems: Yelp now leverages neural networks to increase the relevance of ads for consumers with improvements to matching and photos, while making ads more cost-effective for local businesses.
- Search and photo relevance: Neural networks allow us to better understand search intent and surface the most relevant and helpful businesses with the most visually appealing photos based on queries.
- Photo viewing experience: Neural networks understand hierarchical features in images, enabling Yelp to create photo category tabs on restaurant, food, and nightlife business pages, which allow users to easily find photos of what they’re most interested in, whether it’s the latest menu or what the ramen looks like.
- Popular dishes & drinks: Neural networks parse Yelp review text, rank and populate our Popular Dishes and Popular Drinks features, which surface highly recommended dishes and drinks at restaurant, cafe, or nightlife businesses.
- NSFW photo detection: Neural networks detect photos that may violate Yelp’s content guidelines and flag them for human moderators to review before they’re published to the platform.
- Yelp Waitlist: Neural networks significantly increase the accuracy of Yelp Waitlist, which restaurants rely on to estimate wait times for tables.
Rate of Innovation
With all these moves, Yelp is the latest local media & commerce player to boost its capabilities through AI. This trend continues to heat up across the sector while some integrations are meaningful and others are more about PR lift. Yelp’s latest integration (and those seen prior) are squarely in the former camp.
As for Yelp’s other recent AI integrations, they include large language models to better mine all the data in its treasure trove of user-generated content. The goal is to boost the search and discovery experience so that the right content is served to the right users, including suggesting local businesses.
Based on Yelp’s historical adoption and its rate of innovation in the AI department – not to mention the rapid pace of AI advancement in general – we can likely expect much more from the company in the coming months on the AI front. Besides speculative signals, Yelp is explicit in its intent to do so.
“The fast pace of innovation, and our ability to scale neural network training sets, means the capabilities of Yelp’s models continue to advance rapidly,” said Eaton.
