Yelp, now with more AI
Five stars may no longer be enough.
Context, as they say, is everything. Now Yelp’s artificial intelligence can detect it.
Yelp’s adding more AI to its product offering, including bot-generated review summaries that score aspects of the restaurant, including food. The values, between 1 and 100, represent aggregate reviewer sentiment for things like service, wait time, and drinks. According to Yelp, its AI understands the context of a user’s review, even if these topics aren’t explicitly addressed.
There are more changes, too, including a more personalized home feed, trending searches, and more tools for advertisers, helping them choose the best content to promote with ROI — return on investment — in mind.
Yelp hopes the new features will drive usage on its restaurant pages. Ad revenue in Yelp’s restaurant, retail and other categories division is down 6 percent year over year. Company executives attribute the slump in part to increased labor and food costs.
Yelp turned 20 this year, and its business goes well beyond hospitality.
Restaurants are the second-most popular category on Yelp, making up 17 percent of the platform’s reviews. But as the online ratings industry has grown, so has the business of taking advantage of the relative anonymity the internet provides.
Last month, Londoners pranked the system by posting favorable but fraudulent reviews of a tourist-trap steakhouse. It was a fun prank (and the CEO of London’s Angus Steakhouse played along), but it also highlighted a flaw in the process: reviews, and, by extension, a restaurant’s online reputation, are shockingly easy to manipulate.
And just this week, at least three McDonald’s locations in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the town where suspected killer Luigi Mangione was recognized and reported to police, were immediately flooded with one-star Google reviews complaining about “rats,” a nod to the contentious online debate surrounding the apparent murder of a healthcare chief executive. (There’s always a restaurant angle.)
A representative for Google said the reviews violated terms of service and have been removed. The FTC, which helps regulate business and protect consumers, implemented new rules around fraudulent online reviews this year that target the people who leave them; platforms that publish reviews are not required to make sure they’re legitimate.
A few good year-end lists:
The best new restaurants in New York City this year — New York Times
The best new restaurants in New York City, per Grubstreet — Grubstreet
America’s favorite delivery spots on DoorDash — DoorDash
The 10 most beautiful Bay Area restaurants this year — San Francisco Chronicle
An obsessive guide to San Francisco’s rebooted restaurant scene ($) — San Francisco Standard
The 101 best restaurants in Los Angeles — Los Angeles Times
The best new restaurants in America, 2024 — Esquire