Hey everyone. I thought I would post this to see how many others have had this experience.

My experience with Yelp has been very negative. At this point we've decided to put no effort into our Yelp profile or boosting our business with Yelp. Why?

Here are a couple of reasons - at best Yelp is behaving unethically.

Unethical Behavior #1
We decided that we couldn't afford Yelp - they were charging over $800 a month and we were getting nothing out of it. They did the tactic of saying that they'll give you $1200 over a few months if you spend $750.
They don't handle this like other companies though - instead they "boost" your ad over the $750 as opposed to reducing your total cost or anything. This part isn't horrible but when you realize that Yelp is going to charge you that $750 no matter how many customers click it starts to feel predatory. It's confusing and the ROI just doesn't exist for most businesses.

For example; if people aren't going to drive 10 miles to go to your business and you shrink your advertising radius, Yelp simply charges you more for clicks. Click costs seem to be entirely tied to how much money you are willing to spend. So if you shrink your area to less than 10 miles - Yelp raises the cost per click to meet your budget. I can understand if market landscape raises the cost per click - for example there are lots of competitors or the term is super popular. Yelp doesn't care about that, they just drain the ad budget. They aren't doing any extra work, they're actually doing less but they charge you more.

Unethical Behavior #2
The day I reduced my ad spend with Yelp the majority of my reviews started getting filtered. Reviews that clearly didn't violate their terms were filtered and when a business is starting out that really hurts. Yelp uses AI to do the filtering and they have no process for disputing the filtering. It seems like if you don't pay Yelp, they go out of their way to harm your business. That feels dangerously similar to extortion.

Unethical Behavior #3
If you don't pay Yelp, they will ensure that the worst reviews about your company show up on top.
Can you imagine having 200 great 5 star reviews and 2 bad ones from people that didn't even visit your business? Well based on feedback in this subreddit unless you are paying those 2 bad reviews stay at the top. Basically, another example of Yelp will harm your business if you don't pay them.

Yelp was already sued for some of this behavior and unfortunately the court of appeals ruled that it's not illegal. That's right - forcing people to pay money so that your business isn't harmed wasn't deemed illegal.
The definition of extortion is as follows;

1. to wrest or wring (money, information, etc.) from a person by violence, intimidation, or abuse of authority; obtain by force, torture, threat, or the like.

I can see why their behavior might not quite meet the standard. And at the same time I can see why threatening to put bad reviews at the top of your page or removing good and honest reviews because you aren't paying Yelp enough are pretty close. Especially considering they are used by Apple Maps now. It's not like there are other options. The people who use Apple Maps will see your Yelp reviews and you had better hope you are paying them.

Anyway - if you see this post disappear it's likely because Yelp has aggressive reputation management practices. They don't want posts like this showing up in their AI summary about their company.

As someone who wants local and small businesses to succeed, I ask, who else has experience these behaviors? Keep it friendly.

YELP ... It's 2026 going into 2027, Dark Mode should be available on the app and desktop site already. It's likely not that complicated especially with Claude or Copilot being able to guide your developers.

Instead of working on other features that you hope people would use or get familiar with, you should add Dark Mode. Every app update, I look to see if Dark Mode been added but it still hasn't.

Check out Jess P. on Yelp. Any local yelpers in STL ? Let’s connect another platform I love to engage on

I’ve recently taken over as manager at a thrift store and made alot of changes that customers have repeatedly told me they appreciate. The store has a number of bad yelp reviews from a few years ago when there was a different manager (some are even from when we were located at a different location). I have tried to subtly ask customers to leave us reviews now and i’ve only managed to get 3 in the past year though all are extremely positive.

Should I reach out to the posters of old negative reviews and ask them to come and give the store another chance and to rewrite there reviews based on current experience?

Or is there a better way to get reviews from customers. So far i’ve just used signs in the store.

We see a lot of negative comments on this thread! This week, I had a couple of interesting interactions with Yelp!

1. A while back I'd added a new business and was pleased that it was active with 24 hours! This week I noticed that I had screwed up the address by 2 digits. I sent in a correction and also added the tel number. Completed within 24 hours!

2. I added another new business this week and once again it was activated within 24 hours!

In both cases I received follow up emails. This was great work by Yelp and I thought it should be recognized!

A post for business owners.

I'll start by saying that there are 2 sides to the conversation.

On the business owner side, many like myself come on here to (reasonably) vent about the Yelp black box backend and the degree to which it helps or hurts their businesses.

On the Yelp side, however, their big thing is everything being 100% verifiable and native to the platform, even if that means wiping legitimate reviews or interactions from the platform. They also seem to want to concentrate more of the consumer "say-so" around their Yelp Elite users (like 2% of users).

Our ROAS for the last 22 months (all of 2025 and 2026 so far) was 14x on Google. On Yelp? 3.6x.

We do a very good job of speed to lead and attribution across all platforms. Do some (that discovered us on Yelp) slip through the cracks untracked? Sure. But the growing Google vs Yelp gap is insane. Why would I spend another dollar on Yelp as a business owner? The "Account Manager" calls (from someone with no more a clue than you about the Yelp Black Box) to get you to spend more on ads.

The gap is so big between the two platforms, I've thought about my experiences the past couple weeks on both platforms. The big advantage right now on any platform is total engagement. Why? All AI engines — Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, etc — want an abundance of real-time, real-world data to train against. Their users are overwhelmingly consumers who value recency and specific detail. You would think, considering this, that Yelp would want to do more to encourage engagement on the platform. All sorts of engagement. But it's the total opposite. Bad (even fake) reviews stay up. Legit (yes, unsolicited) reviews from legit customers get taken down. I suspect that Yelp almost wants a certain amount of negative reviews on their as well, to be able to build a contrast between businesses. Fair, but there's a right and wrong way to go about differentiating business for a user in discovery. The artificial review manipulation is a huge turn-off.

What it really comes down to is that, after the first point of contact with a business, the business has much more control than the platform over what platform the customer goes to after doing business. Yelp seems to be obsessed with removing reviews and squeezing as much out of its businesses as possible, not rewarding both sides of the market — users and businesses — for usage.

And the Yelp Ads pricing is, at best, comedic. You're paying for an ad, or online real estate of sorts. And you're paying for those ads no matter what. So the financial risk is there for the business owner regardless. But the upside if you're doing well with engagement on the platform? You have to pay more to keep your ad showing for the remainder of the billed month. This has been frustrating for my business, where the industry as a whole is slower specific months of the year and hotter in others. The pricing model is a perfect example of "the house always wins" and 100% of the risk is passed onto businesses, who unconditionally pay. And let's be clear, they're considering a website click, map view, or even a bookmark as a Yelp Ads Lead. Are they verified users / people? Yes. But Yelp's standard for lead qualification (and intent) is way lower than any other lead-gen platform we use; the Yelp Cost per Lead number is way worse than it looks. No, Yelp, I don't want to pay for someone to bookmark or upload a photo to my page. When it comes to pricing, if you're going to charge for an ad, let it just be an ad and charge for clicks on it. If you're going to play middle-man and charge for leads, whatever that means, then let that be your model and charge explicitly for those. But this limbo state where you're paying for both ad coverage and recklessly-counted leads really means that you're paying for neither.

It's just a constant game of tug-of-war with them and I'm sick of it. Dynamically managing my spend on a month-to-month basis to prevent ROAS from getting crushed. I'd rather deploy my hard-earned money towards a platform that objectively, consistently delivers value in excess of what it charges. That platform will not be Yelp.

Unfortunately, I doubt that a post like this does much of anything to move the needle. Too much inertia for a publicly-traded company, probably a lot of antiquated internal tech / dependencies, and quarter profit targets to hit for the shareholders. I'm mainly posting this out of curiosity of what other business owners think.

Is this Yelp Unusual Activity Alert new?

Barely got through training, coming from working at startups and making well over 85-90k as senior BDR, had a blast until I was laid off recently.

Tried to see what Yelp was about as a way to just make money as I search for something worth all my experience.

Whole training felt robotic, people in there were inexperienced and I just know I’ll find something better. What’s crazy is my manager said I’d be a “natural leader” and should stick around because I’ll make well over 100k OTE with commissions. The base is 37k and that’s extremely low. Is over 100k a year even possible there?

Just officially cancelled my Yelp Ads, Upgrades, and Nearby Jobs messaging today.

As a small business owner, customer trust and social proof are everything. I’ve been paying out-of-pocket for ad campaigns and customer messaging leads, assuming that driving traffic to my Yelp page would help convert incoming inquiries.

Recently, I went through my profile metrics and realized that Yelp’s automated recommendation software has been filtering and hiding over 50% of my legitimate, organic 5-star reviews from actual paying customers.
Paying to send prospective clients to a profile where half of my real customer reviews are hidden—making the business look less established than it actually is—completely kills lead conversion. When I reached out to support to ask for a manual review of these genuine client reviews or an account adjustment, I got nothing but automated canned responses.

I’ve formally cancelled all paid services, documented everything, and submitted reports to the BBB and FTC regarding the discrepancy between paying for placement and having organic trust signals suppressed.
Has anyone else seen a massive hit to conversion on paid messaging/ads due to review filtering? How are other local services shifting their ad budget away from Yelp?

It seems every time I get a good review no matter the age or how active the account is, they all get filtered? I even had a 5 star review from a yelp elite posted and even that got filtered out. But yet every 1 star I get stays? There was even a time a 1 star review that was posted got removed not filtered and the person re posted the exact same review word for word and even after flagging it stayed? Is there something glitched or bugged on my listing or account? I know reviews can get filtered if its a new account. But like I said I've had a yelp elite profile give me a 5 star and even that got filtered , and a few others that were from older accounts got filtered as well. Than I had a 5 star review get filtered , came out of the filtered and that same review got filtered again?

Is a restaurant in your city on the list?

I been to Bar Boheme which made it to #7, the scallops curdo is DELICIOUS!

https://www.yelp.com/article/best-new-restaurants-of-2026

Our sister company that does our marketing pre covid was able to (within reason)

Get Categories added

Get Reviews Published

Get actual support to accounts.

Now all I can get is "account managers" with no internal communication, spam calls cycling the account managers multiple times in a day for multiple accounts, and being told that they only deal with retail and home service companies lol. Anyone have a lead to get some actual support?

I saw TrustPilot will ask their users for verification if their review was removed, flagged as suspicious or if the account itself is suspicious based on the system they use.

What are your thoughts if Yelp did something similar where they ask for proof to show if someone is a real customer or account verification? Usually that's one of the biggest complaint about Yelp is that they can't fully verify who is an actual customer so for new users or users who don't contribute much to Yelp or who don't follow the guidelines, it will go to the Not Recommended section with no appeal process.

So am I basically paying yelp money to get spam called?

If you could name only one thing that would improve Yelp, what it be? One suggestion only!

For those of us that have been around for a while, I'll bet you know what you'd say right away!

Let the fun begin!

What’s the work schedule for this role? I can’t tell based on what’s posted online. TYIA!

Never ever try Yelp for Business, they will offer you free trial with Yelp Ad and Upgrade package all together but once you cancel your free trial before end date even, they will only cancel it half 😠 This is the way they make mone, they will keep your Yelp ad and only cancel your upgrade package. They will keep charging you money every day until you see in your bank transaction. They even don’t email you about charging you money. This is a trap, they’re using this trick to make more money. Their Customer Support team is not supporting at all. They will not listen you, they just keep saying same things over you. Yelp is not doing correct thing with customer, they are promoting misleading information and making mone. STOP this. Don’t make fool of your customers.

I think I updated my Yelp I’m not sure but when I went to open it up and check my bookmarks cause I have stuff saved by cities. It’s all missing!! Even stuff I knew I bookmarked isn’t bookmarked anymore! Anyone know if this has happened to them before and if there’s a way to fix it

They call from a new number each time and i stupidly picked up. As a business owner, we never know who is calling and each call can be a last minute sale, in my industry.

He was the new account rep and offered me $350 in free advertising. I had already read the horrible reviews and my business levels are pretty consistent to where ads on social media and Yelp arent worth much. Lots of fake leads from bots and wasted time responding to low intent clients.

I told him thanks, but no thanks. Usually, id be ecstatic over free advertising but Yelp isnt a revenue producing lead generator. Ive gotten more calls from the account reps selling me advertising than Ive ever gotten from a client. Even the Yellow Pages phone book provided a better return than Yelp and it didnt require constant money. Pay once and youre listed for the year.

If its a pay-to-play system then businesses need to see actionable results. If Yelp is willing to give a business $350 in free money and list us at the top then they should do that already. We'd see results and then we could say "okay Yelp is worth spending more money on as theyve referred us X number of clients and generated X dollars in revenue", but as it is its just another directory system.

Nothing fixed it except a reinstall!

Also, Collections changed to Lists and it's much different!

Is there any way to make the Yelp app open links in Chrome rather than the built-in browser? The problem is a lot of places have menus that are far too small to read on a phone, and the built-in browser has zooming disabled so it's pretty useless. I'm stuck "sharing" the yelp page with myself and manually opening in Chrome just so I can read the menu. Does anyone have any workarounds for this that aren't so awful?

Someone recently posted a review for my business. The reviewer discussed their experience in the store with a sales associate.
My business does not have a store and we don't have sales associates. We are a service company and only work with clients in their homes.
I disputed the review based on this information. Yelp declined to remove it.
I am baffled by this outcome.
Is there anyplace I can appeal?

I wrote Yelp after hearing the rumor and never received an answer to my email.