Rebuilding how Israel's largest marketplace searches, answers, and sells with AI.
50%
rollout in 2 weeks
+7.5%
purchase intent in auto
+2.5%
feed engagement
When failure isn't an option, build with us
Overview:
- Yad2 is Israel's largest classifieds marketplace for real estate and vehicles, one of the country's 20 most visited sites with 8 to 10 million visits a month. It set out to shift its customer experience from rigid filters to natural language, and partnered with Latent to ship the AI behind it.
- Buyers had to navigate layered filters to find a listing, search couldn't read intent the way people actually phrase it, and the platform had no conversational way to answer market questions or help sellers create listings. The experience lagged where a market leader needed to lead.
- Latent built and shipped three production AI systems: a free-text search that turns a single plain-language query into structured filters across real estate and vehicles, a Hebrew real-estate Q&A assistant grounded in market data, and an ad-generation tool that produces ready listing copy and vehicle imagery for dealers. All three reached production.
Moving a national marketplace from filters to natural language
"Yad2 is the largest marketplace in Israel, with over ten million visits a month, and staying in front means leading on technology. We set out to move beyond the best practice of classified search and give users a better experience, a search that understands plain language.״
Yad2 was undergoing a strategic shift in customer experience with a vision to put Yad2 at the front of the Israeli market on technology and lead in this position for years. The goal was to let customers find what they need through a single, simple search bar instead of a chain of filters, and to extend that intelligence into answering market questions and helping sellers build listings. At this scale, failure isn't quiet. A search that missed would show publicly and cost Yad2 reputation.
Three production AI systems spanning search, conversation, and listing creation
The free-text search reads a query in natural Hebrew, identifies the entities inside it, and maps them to Yad2's structured search filters, so one sentence returns the right results across both real estate and vehicles. The second assistant, Yadata, answers real-estate market questions in Hebrew, grounded in market data, with an evaluation layer checking every answer for faithfulness, relevance, and completeness before it ships. The third, ad-generation tool lets vehicle dealers enter a car's details and receive ready-to-publish listing copy alongside a realistic AI-generated imagery.
From a/b testing to full rollout
Yad2 free-text search interprets live customer queries and converts them into filtered results in real time, with the ad-generation tool turning raw vehicle details into complete listings.
The changes generated an impressive 5.2% increase in ad views and a 7.5% increase in vehicle purchase intent. Real Estate Sales saw a 2.5% increase in feed views and a 1.4% increase in ad views.
Additionally, the Q&A assistant we developed continuously serves grounded answers, with automated evaluation reporting on quality across runs. As a result Yad2 user feed views rose ~1%. Yad2 is now rolling out the new functionalities site-wide and expanding the changes to additional vertical pages.
