How Yelp Works for Business Owners
- How to Claim a Yelp Business Page
- Yelp Business Page Settings Explained
- How to Respond to Yelp Reviews
- How to Close a Yelp Business Page
KNOWLEDGE BASE
Yelp
Yelp is the platform that beat the professional city guides by letting strangers do the writing. It is also the platform most likely to quietly delete the reviews you worked hardest to get — not out of malice, but by design, and the design is the thing worth understanding.
Yelp Guides
Each guide is split into a four-part series.
Why Yelp Marks Reviews as Not Recommended
- Why Yelp Hides Some Customer Reviews
- Can a Business Ask Customers for Yelp Reviews
- How to Report a Yelp Review
- What Yelp Consumer Alerts Mean for Businesses
How Yelp Ads Work for Local Businesses
- Where Yelp Ads Appear on Yelp
- How Yelp Ad Billing Works
- How to Cancel Yelp Ads
- Do Yelp Ads Affect Business Reviews
What Is Yelp?
Yelp is an American company operating a crowd-sourced review platform for local businesses, founded in 2004. Users publish reviews and star ratings; businesses can claim their page and respond. Its defining mechanic — the one that separates it from every directory before it — is that it does not publish everything it receives.
Most reviews are filtered, and the filter is automated.
Yelp runs recommendation software that decides which reviews are shown and counted toward a business's rating. Reviews it doesn't recommend are still visible if you dig, but they don't count. This is public, documented, and constantly misunderstood by business owners who ask ten happy customers for reviews and watch nine of them disappear.
Which means "get more reviews" is bad advice here.
A burst of reviews from brand-new accounts with no other activity is exactly the pattern the filter is built to catch. Reviews from established, active Yelp users are the ones that stick. That is a completely different problem to solve, and it can't be solved in a week.
It has a reputation problem of its own, and it's part of the entity.
Yelp has faced sustained allegations from businesses about the relationship between advertising and review visibility — allegations it denies and has litigated. Whatever you conclude, the controversy is part of what people find when they research the platform, and it shapes how much weight a reader gives a Yelp rating.
Reference
Wikipedia: Yelp
The reference article on Yelp — crowd-sourced reviews, the recommendation software that filters them, and the controversies around its advertising model.
Read the full article →Yelp doesn't count every review it receives. Its software decides which ones are recommended — and only those feed your rating.
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