Yelp has long been a source for where to eat and what to order, a familiar scroll of stars, snapshots, and sometimes snarky reviews.
The platform’s newest AI features, Yelp Assistant and Menu Vision mark a shift toward “interactive discovery” in restaurants. Yelp calls this its biggest leap yet in local discovery, designed to make the process more conversational.
“With new AI tools, you can use natural language or voice to search for exactly what you want, like a cozy Italian place with outdoor seating,” said Akhil Kuduvalli, Yelp’s senior vice president of product.
Diners can ask specific questions, like whether a restaurant has vegetarian or gluten-free dishes, what the parking situation is, or what menu items are most loved. “The answers are always evidence-based,” Kuduvalli said.
Kuduvalli emphasized that Yelp Assistant isn’t driven by personal data or order history. It’s powered by Yelp’s vast community-generated content, reviews, photos, and business details.
Bringing menus to life
The new Menu Vision from Yelp lets diners scan any physical menu with their phone and immediately see food photos and reviews.
The feature, Kuduvalli said, “encourages restaurants to think visually about what they offer, since authentic photos and guest feedback can directly influence what people choose to order.”
QR-based menus, image-driven ordering apps, and now AI-assisted search are reshaping how guests decide what to eat.
As Bob Vergidis, founder and chief vision officer at Pointofsale.cloud, told Food On Demand, this generation “isn’t paper-first.” Guests want to see and interact before ordering. “I’ve seen people look at the paper menu, then open the restaurant’s online ordering site just to see what things look like,” he said. QR codes, he added, “kind of fell out of favor for a while,” but are resurging because “you’re able to show food to customers using images, they can actually see what it looks like.”
Related: Next-Gen Diners Are Changing Restaurants
Reputation management
That’s the gap companies like Marqii are aiming to close. Its Social Management tool brings review platforms and social channels into a single dashboard, giving marketing and operators one place to engage with guests and monitor reputation across networks.
Avi Goren, Marqii’s Co-founder and CEO, put it bluntly. “Customers aren’t in one place anymore. They’re everywhere, and whether a restaurant likes it or not, it needs to be everywhere too.”
Goren sees operators realizing that responding to feedback isn’t a chore, it’s public communication. When a restaurant replies to a single complaint, they’re really speaking to thousands of future guests who will read that exchange later.
