Yelp held 330 million cumulative reviews at 31 December 2025 and took 22 million more during that year, from a monthly average of 28 million app unique devices. Its recommendation software did not recommend 17% of the reviews contributed in 2025.

Most Yelp statistics pages quote each other. This one quotes Yelp. Every figure comes from Yelp's fast facts page, its annual report on Form 10-K or its 2025 Trust and Safety Report, and carries the edition and the period it covers. Where two Yelp sources disagree, both are here. All opened 6 September 2026.

How big is Yelp in 2026?

• 330 million cumulative reviews as at 31 December 2025. Yelp Fast Facts, metrics as of 30 June 2026. Yelp's footnote matters: the count "includes reviews that are currently recommended, not recommended, or that have been removed", so it is not what a visitor can read. Yelp's Form 10-K, filed 27 February 2026, puts it more cautiously at "more than 300 million ratings and reviews".
• 22 million reviews were contributed to Yelp during 2025. Yelp Trust and Safety Report 2025, global, 1 January to 31 December 2025.
• Net revenue was $1.465 billion in 2025, up from $1.412 billion in 2024 and $1.337 billion in 2023. Yelp Form 10-K, 27 February 2026.
• Yelp had 5,168 employees globally at 31 December 2025, a figure that includes employees on leave. Yelp Form 10-K, 27 February 2026.
• Yelp.com and its subdomains draw an estimated 94.8 million organic search visits a month, across 12.6 million ranking keywords, 3.5 million of them in the top three positions. Ahrefs Site Explorer, subdomains mode, index date 1 September 2026. An estimate, and here because Yelp publishes no traffic number of its own.

Who uses Yelp?

Yelp publishes app usage and a demographic profile, and no total visitor count. That is why the "75 million monthly visitors" still circulating has no live source behind it.

• 28 million app unique devices, as a monthly average across 2025. Yelp Fast Facts, metrics as of 30 June 2026.
• 43% of US Yelp users are 55 or older, 31% are 35 to 54, and 26% are 18 to 34. comScore Media Metrix Multi-Platform, as of June 2026, reported on Yelp Fast Facts.
• 53% of US Yelp users have a household income of $100,000 or more, 23% are in the $60,000 to $99,000 band and 24% are under $60,000. comScore Media Metrix Multi-Platform, June 2026.
• 27% of US Yelp users have no college education, against 58% who went to college and 15% who went to graduate school. comScore Plan Metrix, June 2026, reported on Yelp Fast Facts.

The age profile is the one most operators get wrong. Yelp's US audience skews older and richer than the platform's reputation suggests.

What businesses are on Yelp?

Yelp does not publish how many business pages exist. It publishes how many are paying, which is a much smaller number.

• Home and local services is the largest category on Yelp at 21% of reviewed businesses, ahead of restaurants at 16% and shopping at 15%. Yelp Fast Facts, metrics as of 30 June 2026.

• 510,000 paying advertising locations, as a monthly average for the second quarter of 2026. Yelp Fast Facts.
• Across 2025 as a whole, paying advertising locations also averaged 510,000, down 3% from 526,000 in 2024. Services rose 2% to 257,000 and restaurants, retail and other fell 8% to 253,000. Yelp Form 10-K, 27 February 2026.
• 70% of Yelp's advertising revenue comes from services categories, and 30% from restaurants, retail and other. Yelp Fast Facts, as of 30 June 2026.
• Advertising revenue from services categories rose 8% to $947.6 million in 2025, lifting total advertising revenue 3% to $1.391 billion. Yelp Form 10-K, 27 February 2026.
• Advertising revenue from restaurants, retail and other businesses fell 6% in 2025, which Yelp puts down to weak advertiser demand in those categories, running since late 2023. Yelp Form 10-K, 27 February 2026.
• Net revenue in the second quarter of 2026 was $375.5 million, up 1% year on year, with net income of $31.7 million, down from $44.1 million a year earlier. Yelp Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results, 6 August 2026.

Restaurants are the category people associate with Yelp. Home and local services is the larger one by reviewed businesses, and services now carries seven of every ten advertising dollars.

What do Yelp ratings look like?

• 55% of Yelp reviews carry five stars and 18% carry one star, which puts 73% of all Yelp reviews at either the top or the bottom of the scale. Yelp Fast Facts, metrics as of 30 June 2026; the 73% is our addition of the two ends.
• 38% of US businesses with five or more reviews average four stars, and 16% average five. Yelp Fast Facts, US businesses with five or more reviews as at 31 December 2025. Yelp uses only recommended reviews to work out a business average.

Percentages do not total 100 because of rounding. Compare the columns: individual reviews pile up at the ends of the scale, and the averages they produce bunch in the middle.

• 54% of US businesses with five or more reviews average four stars or better, and 20% average two stars or worse. Our calculation from the Fast Facts distribution above.
• The average recommended Yelp review runs 446 characters. Yelp Trust and Safety Report 2025, global, as at 31 December 2025. Yelp requires written text with every star rating, so a Yelp rating always has a sentence behind it.

How Yelp's recommendation filter works, and how many reviews it hides

This is the figure the aggregator pages leave out. Yelp's recommendation software decides which reviews show on your page and count towards your rating. The rest sit behind a link at the bottom and count for nothing. Yelp publishes the split in three places, and the three disagree, because they are not counting the same reviews.

• Roughly one Yelp review in seven has never been recommended. 15% of reviews submitted as at 31 December 2025, per the Form 10-K; 14% on the Fast Facts page as at 30 June 2026. The filing gives no removal share, so the 10-K row above is left blank rather than filled in by subtraction.
• Of the reviews contributed during 2025 alone, 17% were not recommended, 11% were removed by Yelp's User Operations team and 2% were removed by the reviewers themselves. Yelp Trust and Safety Report 2025, global.
• A recent year runs harsher than the all-time pool. The 2025 cohort was recommended at 70% against 76% for every review submitted. Yelp says it improved the software during 2025 to catch reviews lacking detail or carrying conflicts of interest. No like-for-like series is published, so read the gap as a difference in measurement rather than a trend.
• Solicited reviews are one of the four things Yelp says the software looks for, alongside conflicts of interest, reliability and usefulness. The 10-K spells out why: "Businesses also tend to ask for reviews from customers they know will give them a great rating."
• Not-recommended reviews do not count towards the star rating or the review count. They stay readable behind a link at the bottom of the page. Yelp, recommendation software, read 6 September 2026.
• No Yelp employee can override the software. Its own FAQ puts it flatly: "No employee at Yelp has the ability to override the decisions that the software makes." The same page says reviews of advertisers and non-advertisers are treated the same way.

Solicitation is the practical trap. Run a Yelp review drive and you can watch the reviews it produced get filtered out. Reporting does not undo it. How to delete a Yelp review covers what Yelp will take down and what happens when a review vanishes on its own.

What Yelp removed in 2025

All of the following are from the Yelp Trust and Safety Report 2025, covering 1 January to 31 December 2025.

• 193,700 or more reported reviews were removed by Yelp's User Operations team in the US. Leading reasons: not a firsthand experience (25%), conflicts of interest (15%), wrong business (12%), inappropriate content (11%), other (36%).

• 46,200 or more reviews were removed for inappropriate content, meaning threats, lewdness, hate speech or privacy violations.
• 50,700 or more new business pages were rejected before they appeared, a 29% increase on 2024. Yelp names locksmiths, garage door repairs, roadside assistance and plumbing as the categories where the spam concentrates.
• More than 3.6 million photos were removed, up 25% on 2024, most of them promoting fake contact numbers. The same wave of spam produced more than 889,800 fake phone support accounts on airline business pages, which Yelp removed.
• 491 Compensated Activity and Suspicious Review Activity Alerts were placed on business pages. 67% were for suspicious positive reviews arriving from one IP address, 26% for someone offering payment or an incentive, 7% for a possible review-ring link.
• 527 warnings were issued to businesses for suspected one-off compensated or incentivised review behaviour, the step below a public alert on your page.
• Alerts tied to review exchange rings fell 62% on 2024, while account closures related to rings rose 49%.
• 1,450 or more Media Attention Alerts were placed on US business pages, 82% Unusual Activity and 18% Public Attention. More than 66,200 reviews attached to Unusual Activity Alerts were removed, and alerts tied to political incidents rose 96% on 2024.
• 75% of Media Attention Alerts followed a social media post about the business going viral, and more than 63,100 reviews were removed as a result. US only.
• Yelp made more than 1,020 reports to other platforms about groups trading or paying for reviews, up 45% on 2024, and 60% led to action.
• Yelp avoided producing user information in 99% of the 4,267 US accounts subject to legal demands, and placed six Questionable Legal Threat Alerts on business pages.

Read the alert numbers together. A viral social post is now the largest single trigger for Yelp locking a page down, and the reviews that arrive during one get removed rather than answered.

How Yelp compares with Google for reviews

Yelp is a large platform. Google is a different order of magnitude, and that is where any decision about your attention starts.

• Google published more than 1 billion helpful reviews across Maps in 2025. Yelp took 22 million. Google, "New ways we're protecting businesses on Maps", 16 April 2026, covering calendar 2025.
• 73% of reviews sat on Google and 6% on Yelp in the last platform-share analysis of any size. ReviewTrackers, Online Reviews Statistics and Trends Report, published 9 January 2022, 48,000-plus business locations. Dated. Nothing comparable has been published since.
• Yelp claims a 3.4 times lead in citations over its nearest competitor as a home services discovery source across major AI platforms. Yelp, "Yelp Brings Reservations and Waitlist to ChatGPT", 10 August 2026. Yelp's own claim, with no method published.

The totals are less useful than the structural differences. Yelp requires text with every rating and filters what it shows; Google takes bare ratings and shows almost everything it does not block. The two also give businesses opposite instructions. Google tells businesses to ask customers for reviews; Yelp's content guidelines say "businesses should never ask customers to write reviews". One programme cannot follow both. Our online review statistics page has the consumer-side numbers and the platform enforcement totals.

What the Yelp statistics mean for a service business

Three things follow from the numbers above, and one of them contradicts what this page used to say.

Do not run a review campaign on Yelp. The 2022 version of this page told businesses to request Yelp reviews from every customer. That was wrong, and it is against Yelp's guidelines. Solicitation is one of the four signals the software looks for, so the ask does not merely fail: it can push the reviews it produced into the not-recommended pile. Ask on Google, where it is allowed, and let Yelp accumulate. How to get more Google reviews is that work done inside Google's review policy.

Claim the page if you are in home and local services. That category is 21% of reviewed businesses, and services carry 70% of Yelp's advertising revenue, so it is where Yelp's attention sits. Claiming costs nothing, and closing the account later does less than owners hope, as deleting a Yelp account sets out.

Reply, because the reply is the part you control. You cannot move the filter, you cannot pay to remove a review, and roughly one in seven never appears anyway. You can answer the ones that do. How to write a Yelp review response has the wording.

Yelp is one of the 39 review sites Cloutly reads into one inbox across every location, and it is watched rather than written to, because a platform whose guidelines forbid asking is not one you run a campaign on.

Where these Yelp fact sheet figures come from

This page follows four rules.

1. Yelp first. Every figure about Yelp comes from Yelp: the Fast Facts page in its press room, the Form 10-K it filed with the SEC on 27 February 2026, the 2025 Trust and Safety Report, or a dated press release. Nothing is carried across from another statistics roundup.
2. Edition and period on every number, written the way Yelp writes it. "As at 31 December 2025" and "monthly average in 2025" are not the same statement.
3. Disagreements get published, not resolved. Where Yelp's sources give different splits, the table above shows all three and says what each one counts.
4. Nothing older than 2023 unless it is the only figure there. One fails that test, the 2022 ReviewTrackers platform share, and it is marked Dated.

Three non-Yelp sources appear. Google's Maps figures are Google's own, 16 April 2026. The traffic figure is an Ahrefs Site Explorer estimate at index date 1 September 2026, not a measurement. ReviewTrackers sells review software, so it is cited by publisher and edition as text and not linked.

One methodology change is worth knowing. Yelp "revised the minimum required level of engagement for our desktop unique devices metric to exclude devices that visit the Yelp home page, but take no further action" during 2025 (Form 10-K, 27 February 2026), so desktop comparisons spanning that change are not like for like.

Two absences we are not going to fill. Neither Yelp's press room nor its 2025 annual report gives a total number of business pages, so any "X million businesses on Yelp" figure is old or invented. And neither gives a total monthly visitor count, which is why the repeated 75 million figure has nothing behind it.

Last checked: 6 September 2026. Next check: December 2026. We re-check this page every quarter against Yelp's fast facts page, its latest quarterly results and the next Trust and Safety Report. Superseded figures get replaced and the date above changes. If a number here is wrong, tell us.

Yelp statistics FAQ

How many reviews are on Yelp?

330 million cumulative reviews as at 31 December 2025, on Yelp's fast facts page. That total includes reviews currently recommended, not recommended and removed, so the number a visitor can read is smaller. Yelp's annual report gives it as "more than 300 million".

How many people use Yelp?

Yelp publishes app usage rather than total visitors: 28 million app unique devices, as a monthly average across 2025. Neither the press room nor the annual report carries a monthly visitor total, so any current "75 million visitors" claim traces back to a metric Yelp retired.

What percentage of Yelp reviews are filtered?

17% of the reviews contributed during 2025 were not recommended, per Yelp's 2025 Trust and Safety Report. Across every review submitted the share is 15%, as at 31 December 2025, per Yelp's annual report. Not-recommended reviews stay visible on a secondary page but do not count towards the rating.

How many businesses are on Yelp?

Yelp does not publish it. What it publishes is 510,000 paying advertising locations, a monthly average for the second quarter of 2026, which counts only businesses buying ads. Any total business-page count in circulation is a third-party estimate or a figure Yelp retired years ago.

Is Yelp still relevant in 2026?

For home and local services, yes. That category is 21% of reviewed businesses and 70% of Yelp's advertising revenue, and Yelp content now feeds several AI assistants including ChatGPT. For most businesses it is a page worth claiming and replying on, not a place to run a campaign.

Closing a Yelp business account does not delete the business page or its reviews. It only gives up your access to manage that page. Yelp says plainly that it does not remove business pages.

That is frustrating if “delete my account” was meant to make the listing disappear, but it also makes the choice clearer. Decide what you actually want to happen before closing anything.

Business account or personal Yelp account?

Yelp has two different account types.

• A consumer account is the account someone uses to write reviews, save businesses and post photos.
• A Yelp for Business account lets an owner claim and manage a business page.

Closing a consumer account removes the content posted through that consumer profile, and Yelp says it cannot be restored. Closing a business account does not remove the business page. Yelp explains the difference in its account-closing help article.

This guide is about the business account.

Your four options

None of these is a shortcut for wiping the review history of an operating business.

Close the Yelp for Business account

In the Yelp for Business app, open Account Information, choose Close or delete my account, then follow the prompts. If the account has advertising attached to it, deal with the advertising agreement first. Closing the free business login does not necessarily cancel a separate paid contract.

Before closing it, download anything you need and make sure another owner does not still rely on the account. Once access is gone, you also lose the ordinary ability to update the page and answer reviews.

If all you want is to hand control to someone else, closing is too blunt. Add the new owner or relinquish the claim instead.

Unclaim the business page

Yelp calls this relinquishing ownership. It removes the page from your business account but leaves the listing public. Yelp's ownership guide says to contact support if the self-service option is not available.

Use this when you sold the business, claimed the wrong listing or no longer represent the company. Do not use it merely because the reviews are hard to read. An unclaimed page can still rank, collect reviews and show old information, only now nobody from the business is looking after it.

Mark a business permanently closed

If the business really has closed, update the page rather than deleting your account and hoping Yelp works it out.

Yelp's current route is Business Information, then Manage extended closures, where an eligible owner can mark the business permanently closed. Yelp warns that the owner will lose the ability to manage the page, respond to reviews and make further updates. Its closure instructions also confirm that the page is not removed.

Closed businesses can still appear in search or open from an old link. That is deliberate. The record helps people understand what happened to the business they remember.

If the real problem is a review

Do not close the account. Report the review if it breaks Yelp's content rules, answer it if it does not, and keep managing the page.

Our guide to removing a Yelp review explains what Yelp will consider. If the review stays up, use the Yelp response guide to write for the next customer who reads it.

Yelp is also unusual because it tells businesses not to ask customers for reviews. Do not try to repair the rating by sending a Yelp review campaign, offering an incentive or selecting only happy customers. The sensible work on Yelp is accurate information, honest responses and service worth talking about.

Before you close anything

Run this quick check:

1. Cancel or transfer any paid Yelp products separately.
2. Save invoices and account records you need.
3. Update hours, phone and website if the business is still operating.
4. Add another authorised owner if the business has changed hands.
5. Answer any review that needs a final public response.
6. Choose unclaim, permanent closure or account closure based on the outcome you want.

The account and the listing are not the same thing. Once you keep those separate, Yelp's options make more sense, even if none of them is the delete button you hoped to find.

To respond to Yelp reviews you need a claimed Yelp Page, an approved profile photo of you or a representative, and an approved business account name. With those in place, every review in the Reviews section of your Yelp for Business account carries two buttons: Respond, which posts a public comment under the review, and Direct message, which sends a private note to the reviewer. Yelp recommends starting with the public one, because that is the one future customers read.

Learning how to respond to Yelp reviews is not the same job as replying on Google. Yelp is the one major review site that tells businesses never to ask for reviews, and its content guidelines say you cannot use a third-party AI tool to draft what you post. Your reply is close to the only lever you have here, and a person has to write it.

How to respond to Yelp reviews, step by step

These are Yelp's own steps, from How do I respond to reviews of my business?, read on 6 September 2026.

On the Yelp for Business website:

1. Open the Reviews section of your business account, in the left-hand menu. If you have access to more than one page, check you are viewing the right one.
2. Find the review and click either Respond or Direct message.
3. Type your text.
4. Click the arrow icon on the right to send.

In the Yelp for Business app: tap More in the bottom navigation bar, check which page you are on, tap Reviews, then Respond or Direct message, type, and tap the arrow icon.

Changed your mind after posting? Click the overflow menu (the three dots) to the right of your reply and choose Edit response or Delete response.

If one login holds several claimed pages, switch location before you start: the See all locations dropdown at the top left on the website, the locations icon in the top right corner in the app. Answering from the wrong page is the commonest multi-site mistake, and the fix is to give each page a named owner who writes its replies.

Yelp has a third route. Under any four or five-star review sits a Thank button, which sends a short note the reviewer sees and nobody else does. Yelp is blunt about it: a personalised public response is better, but this "will do in a pinch".

Yelp public comment vs direct message: which one to use

A public comment and a direct message do different jobs, and the mistake is using the private one first.

Both quotes come from Yelp's tips for responding to reviews, and its support centre gives the reason to lead with the public one: "That way you get credit for your customer service." Use a public comment for the record and a direct message for details. Anything carrying a customer's private information belongs in the direct message, because Yelp's privacy guideline applies to what you write as much as to what they wrote.

What makes a Yelp reply different from a Google one

You must not ask for the review in the first place. Yelp's content guidelines say, under conflicts of interest, "Businesses should never ask customers to write reviews." Its help centre goes further: "you shouldn't be surprised if our software fails to recommend the reviews that you've asked your customers to write". Everywhere else, asking every customer is the job. On Yelp it can cost you the reviews it produces. For a network that means the volume per location is not yours to control. The reply rate is, and it is the only Yelp number a multi-site business can move.

Not every review counts. About three quarters of reviews across Yelp are recommended. The rest stay readable behind a "reviews that are not currently recommended" link at the foot of the page, and Yelp says they "do not factor into the overall star rating of that business". No Yelp employee can override that software. How the filter works is covered in our guide to deleting a Yelp review, and the share it catches is in Yelp statistics.

You have to write the reply yourself. The same guidelines say you "shouldn't use third-party AI tools and chatbots to create reviews or other content, including using such tools to draft or revise content", and Yelp adds that content created that way is "subject to removal and repeated violations may result in account closure". Software can put the review in front of you and flag the ones still unanswered. The sentences have to be yours. Yelp is one of the 39 review sites Cloutly reads, so every location's Yelp reviews land in the same inbox as Google and Facebook, and nothing in it asks a customer for a Yelp review.

What gets a Yelp response removed

Your comment is content you contribute to Yelp, so the content guidelines cover it. Five of them catch business owners.

• Privacy. "Don't publicize people's private information", and don't post other people's full names. No surnames, no appointment details, no invoice amounts, nothing medical or financial in a public comment.
• Inappropriate content. Colourful language is fine. Threats, harassment, lewdness and hate speech are not, and a heated reply to a one-star is where owners cross that line.
• Promotional content. Yelp asks people not to post promotional material outside a Yelp advertising product bought through a Business Account. A comment is not the place for an offer code.
• Post your own content. The AI clause above, which covers drafting and revising.
• Relevance. Contributions should address the consumer experience. So should your reply, which is another way of saying do not argue about the reviewer.

How to respond to a bad Yelp review

Yelp's own advice is simple. Take a minute first: owners who pause "tell us their responses are less heated and more resolution based", though Yelp adds "don't wait too long". Take the high road, because a defensive tone turns off the people reading rather than the person who wrote the review. Accept that you cannot please everyone.

Use the reviewer's first name and no more, since the privacy guideline rules out the full one. Then say what changed, not only that you are sorry. An apology costs nothing and the next reader knows it. A named change with a number in it answers the question they are actually asking, which is what happens if this goes wrong for me.

Positive reviews need less work than owners think. Yelp's instruction is "a genuine, honest, personalized thanks. That's it." Name one thing only this review mentioned, and stop.

Eight Yelp review response templates

Copy any of these and change the line only your business could have written. Every business and customer below is invented.

1. A review Yelp is not recommending, that you can still see.

Thanks Marcus. Twenty minutes past a booked slot is not what we promise, and you were right to say so. The Thursday evening list has a fifteen-minute buffer in it now. If you bring Ruby back in, put my name on the booking.

Toby, Fernhill Veterinary

A not-recommended review sits behind a link at the foot of your page and does not count towards your rating, so treat it as a complaint to fix rather than a fire to put out. Reporting it changes nothing, because nobody at Yelp can override the software.

2. A review that names one of your staff.

Thanks Priya. Emma will be glad this is in writing and I have read it out to her. She spends most of a first session on the questions people are too polite to ask, which sounds like what happened here. See you at the six-week check.

Sam, Coastline Physio

Use the first name the reviewer used and no more. Yelp's privacy guideline rules out posting someone's full name, and that applies to your own team.

3. A review that is about a different location.

Thanks for writing this. Reading it back, I think the visit was to our Newtown yard rather than this one, and either way I want it looked at. Send the date and the docket number to the office email and I will take it to the right manager myself.

Grant, Northbank Storage

Yelp asks reviewers to post "only to the Yelp business page for the specific location you visited or contacted", so a misplaced review can be reported under the relevance guideline. Reply first anyway: the report may fail and the reply will not.

4. A complaint about price.

Thanks Josh. The call-out fee is on the website and in the booking text, and neither of those got in front of you, which is our problem rather than yours. The invoice breakdown is in your email and I am happy to walk through it on the phone.

Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

Work out whether they were surprised or overcharged before you type. Surprise is a disclosure failure and you own it. Never apologise for the price itself.

5. A complaint about the wait.

Thanks Tessa. Forty minutes past a booking turns a table into a queue, and the worse part is that nobody came over to tell you what was happening. There is a runner on the floor from this month whose job is exactly that. Book the early sitting if you are in a hurry, and ask for me.

Hana, The Copper Pot

Name the failure the reviewer did not name. Usually it was the silence rather than the minutes.

6. A complaint you have already fixed.

Thanks for coming back to us, Rachel. The double charge was ours and it was refunded on Tuesday. The desk can issue a refund on the spot now, which is the bit that wasted your afternoon.

Bianca, Loomis and Fern

Say what you did and stop. Do not ask them to update the review, and never let a refund read as a trade for one.

7. A review you believe is fake.

We have no job, invoice or file under this name, and the work described is not something we do. Yelp pages are open to anyone, so occasionally a review turns up that does not match a visit. We have reported it and will leave it to Yelp. Our other 340 reviews are from people who booked.

Kirsty, Marlow Electrical

State the missing record as a fact, not an accusation. A public claim that someone was never a customer needs to be true: the US Federal Trade Commission's reviews rule treats a knowingly false public statement about a reviewer as review suppression.

8. A glowing one.

Thanks Dylan. That wheel took two builds, because the first set of spokes was a hair short and nobody was ever going to notice except us. Bring it back at 500 kilometres and I will re-tension it for nothing.

Ruben, Halcyon Cycles

Short, and one line of it is a fact only you could know. That is a complete reply to a five-star review, and it is the one people copy the least.

For the same job on other platforms, our review response examples cover thirty replies across Google, Facebook and Tripadvisor, and 1-star review response examples take the hardest single case. To read the reviews before you write, start with bad review examples.

Can I remove a negative review on Yelp?

Usually not. Only the person who wrote a review can delete it. You can report it, and Yelp's moderators take one down only when it breaks a content guideline, most often because it is not the writer's own firsthand experience or there is a conflict of interest. Plenty of reports come back declined, and a review you disagree with is not one of the categories.

If a reviewer offers to remove it for money or freebies, Yelp's instruction is specific: do not pay, save the messages, and report it. It will not get involved "if a customer is simply asking for a refund to remedy a bad experience". The full report flow, and what removal services are really selling, are in how to delete a Yelp review. If the page itself is the problem, deleting a Yelp account explains why that rarely helps.

Frequently asked questions

Can you respond to a Yelp review as the owner?

Yes, once you have claimed the page. Each review in the Reviews section of Yelp for Business carries a Respond button for a public comment and a Direct message button for a private note. Yelp also requires an approved profile photo of you or a representative, and an approved business account name.

Should you respond to every Yelp review?

Yes, starting with the public comment. In a 2023 survey commissioned by Yelp and conducted by Material, 70% of people who read reviews said they are more likely to write one for a business if they see the owner responding, and 86% said they are more likely to look past a business's critical reviews when it answers them and addresses the problem.

Can you use AI to write a Yelp review response?

No. Yelp's content guidelines say you should not use third-party AI tools or chatbots to create reviews or other content, "including using such tools to draft or revise content", and content created that way can be removed. This is the opposite of Google, where an edited AI first draft is fine.

Can you delete a response you posted on Yelp?

Yes. Click the three dots to the right of your reply and choose Edit response or Delete response, on the website or in the app.

Can you ask customers for Yelp reviews?

No. Yelp's content guidelines say businesses should never ask customers to write reviews, and its recommendation software looks for "reviews that it suspects the business owner or an employee asked for". Exclude Yelp from your review requests and let it fill up on its own.

You cannot delete a Yelp review unless you wrote it yourself. A business owner can report it, and Yelp removes a review only when it breaks one of its content guidelines. Human moderators decide, the answer arrives by email in a few days, and plenty of reports come back declined.

Most guides stop there, which leaves out the two things owners on Yelp actually hit: a review that vanishes with nobody reporting it, because Yelp's software stopped recommending it, and a warning banner Yelp can hang over your reviews that does more damage than any one-star. Removed, filtered and flagged are three different problems. This guide keeps them apart, answers the cost question, and covers why Yelp tells businesses never to ask for reviews.

Can you delete a Yelp review?

Not if someone else wrote it. Yelp gives owners one route: report the review and ask moderators to take it down under the content guidelines. Yelp says removing user content "is not something we take lightly" and that it "doesn't take sides in factual disputes". Evaluation may take several days, and reporting guarantees nothing.

The only person who can delete a Yelp review outright is the person who wrote it, from their own account, using the steps in Yelp's Support Center. You cannot do it for them, and you must not pay them to do it.

What Yelp actually removes

Yelp publishes the criteria its moderators apply. When should I report a review? names three reasons it will take a review down. If yours does not fit one of them, a report is wasted effort.

Yelp's own numbers point the same way. Of the 193,700-plus reported reviews its User Operations team removed in the US in 2025, 25% went for not being a firsthand experience and 15% for a conflict of interest, against 11% for inappropriate content (Yelp Trust & Safety Report 2025). The category owners underuse is the one that wins most often.

Two complaints Yelp will not act on: a review you believe is factually wrong, and a review that is simply harsh. It does not adjudicate whose account of the night is correct. If you suspect the review was fabricated rather than just brutal, our guide to identifying fake reviews covers the signals worth checking first.

How to report a Yelp review, step by step

These steps are Yelp's own, from How do I report a review?, read in September 2026.

1. Claim your Yelp Page. Yelp notes you may still need to claim it before you can report content from a business account. Claiming is free at biz.yelp.com.
2. Decide which guideline it breaks, using the three categories above. If you cannot name one, do not file. Check the firsthand-experience angle first, because that is what moderators remove most.
3. Gather your evidence. Booking records, a receipt, a staff roster, the reviewer's other reviews, a screenshot of the same text elsewhere. Conflict-of-interest claims live or die on this.
4. Find the review in the Reviews section of your Yelp for Business account, on the left-hand menu. Managing several pages? Switch to the right one from the See all locations dropdown first.
5. Open More Options (the three dots) and choose Report Review. The app works the same way: the three dots on iPhone, the overflow menu on Android.
6. Check the status. Hovering over the flag icon beside the review shows whether it is still being assessed or has been declined. Yelp emails the decision to your registered address, and if it removes the review it usually tells the reviewer too.

One report per review. Filing again does not escalate it.

How much does it cost to remove a Yelp review?

Nothing. Claiming your page, reporting a review and replying are all free. Yelp sells no removal product and no paid appeal, and it says that other than giving advertisers ads, "advertisers don't get any preferential treatment" (Does Yelp treat advertisers any differently?). On the filter side, no employee can override the recommendation software, which Yelp calls a deliberate choice to avoid conflicts of interest.

Every paid route buys something other than removal. A removal service charges you for the report you could file yourself, and Yelp's moderators still decide, so a guarantee of removal is a guarantee nobody is in a position to make. A lawyer buys a legal process, not a takedown button. Paying the reviewer costs the most of all: Yelp issued 527 warnings to businesses over suspected compensated or incentivised review behaviour in 2025, and the step up from a warning is a public alert on your page.

Why your Yelp review disappeared without you doing anything

Plenty of owners searching for how to delete a Yelp review are describing something else: a review that is no longer visible, that neither they nor Yelp's moderators touched. That is the recommendation software, and it is the most misunderstood thing about the platform.

Every review goes through an automated system that decides which ones to recommend, based on what Yelp calls "hundreds of signals of quality, reliability, and user activity on Yelp". Yelp publishes what it looks for: conflicts of interest, solicited reviews it suspects a business or an employee asked for, reviewers it does not know enough about to rely on, and reviews it reads as unhelpful rants or raves.

This is not rare. Of the 22 million reviews contributed to Yelp worldwide in 2025, 17% were not recommended, against 70% recommended and 11% removed by Yelp's own team. One review in six never counts.

The decision can move both ways. Yelp says the software runs and learns regularly, so a filtered review can reappear months later with no explanation. It also got stricter in 2025, when Yelp filtered out nearly 500,000 reviews carrying the characteristics of AI-generated content.

Keep the three states apart, because acting on the wrong one wastes weeks.

Yelp's platform numbers change every year. Ours are in the Yelp fact sheet.

The Consumer Alert badge, and what triggers it

The worst thing that can happen to a Yelp page is not a one-star review. It is a Consumer Alert: a warning message Yelp displays over your reviews after what it calls a thorough investigation, with the evidence attached wherever possible.

Three of the five types are ones a business brings on itself. A Compensated Activity Alert goes up when Yelp has evidence someone offered cash or other incentives in exchange for a review. A Suspicious Review Activity Alert covers patterns like a run of reviews from one IP address, or reviewers connected to a group that trades incentivised fake reviews. A Questionable Legal Threats Alert appears when Yelp has evidence a business may be abusing the legal system to intimidate a reviewer.

The other two follow attention you did not ask for: an Unusual Activity Alert after a media-driven spike in reviews that are not firsthand, during which posting on the page is disabled, and a Public Attention Alert when someone associated with the business is accused of, or targeted by, racist or discriminatory behaviour.

Yelp placed 491 Compensated Activity and Suspicious Review Activity alerts worldwide in 2025, 6 Questionable Legal Threats alerts, and more than 1,450 media attention alerts on US pages. Suspicious Review Activity alerts can appear anywhere in the world; the other two self-inflicted types are US-only, and the media-driven pair runs in the US and Canada.

Yelp asks businesses not to request reviews at all

This is the part a review software company has every incentive to leave out, so here it is plainly. Yelp's content guidelines say, in one sentence: "Businesses should never ask customers to write reviews."

Yelp's support article Don't Ask for Reviews spells out the scope. Do not ask anyone, including customers, mailing list subscribers, friends or family. Do not let staff compete to collect reviews. Do not ask after a survey or a contact form. Do not offer freebies, discounts or payment for reviews, which Yelp notes "may also be illegal". And you cannot offer incentives to remove reviews either. Owners who conclude from that they would rather not be on Yelp should read deleting a Yelp account first.

Yelp's stated reason is that its software is built to spot prompted reviews and not recommend them, and that many businesses only ask happy customers, "which leads to biased ratings". Asking, on Yelp, can quietly cost you the reviews you generate.

Yelp is the exception, not the rule. Google, Facebook and most other review sites expect businesses to ask, as long as the ask goes to every customer and carries no incentive. So exclude Yelp from your review requests and let it fill up on its own. Cloutly reads Yelp as one of the 39 review sites it watches, so Yelp reviews land in the same inbox as everything else, and it never asks a customer for a Yelp review, because Yelp does not allow it. What Yelp wants instead: claim and complete the page, reply to the reviews you get, add photos, and give people an experience worth writing about unprompted.

The mistake in the other direction costs just as much. Never sort customers by how happy they are before deciding who gets asked, on any platform. The US Federal Trade Commission says its review rule carries no specific ban on asking only the customers you think are happy, but that the practice "could violate the FTC Act". Ask everyone or ask nobody.

How to respond to a bad Yelp review

Future customers read your reply when they scroll past the review. That often matters more than a removal you probably will not get. Yelp says its own data shows businesses with some critical reviews get more page views than businesses with none.

In the Reviews section of your Yelp for Business account, each review carries Respond and Direct Message. Yelp recommends starting with the public one, and it wants an approved profile photo and business account name before you can reply at all. Save the direct message for when you need something personal to fix the problem, like a booking reference. It will not keep the complaint off the page either way.

Two constraints on what you write. Yelp's guidelines say contributors must not use third-party AI tools or chatbots to create content, "including using such tools to draft or revise content", so the words have to be yours. And the FTC's review rule treats a knowingly false public accusation about a reviewer as review suppression, so "this person has never been a customer" is a claim you need to be sure of.

Three worked replies. The businesses are invented.

1. The service genuinely went wrong (public)

Hi Marcus. You booked a 40-minute appointment and got 25, and you were right to be annoyed. We double-booked the 4pm slot on Thursday and you paid for it. I have refunded the session today and taken same-hour double bookings out of our system so it cannot repeat. If you come back, ask for me and I will take the session myself. Sam, owner, Coastline Physio.

Name the fault, say what you changed, make the offer once.

2. An account you believe is not accurate (public)

Hi Jordan. That is not how the appointment looks in our records, and I would rather work it out with you than argue about it here. Our notes show two calls to the mobile on file before we closed the job, and if those did not reach you then something went wrong on our side. I have sent you a direct message with my number. Alex, Northgate Auto.

Say your version once, then move it off the page. Do not litigate line by line in public, and do not post anyone's private details, which Yelp's privacy guideline covers.

3. When you need details, by direct message

Hi Rachel, this is Sam from Coastline Physio. I would like to refund your session and sort out the follow-up appointment you were owed. Could you send me the date you came in and the name the booking is under? I will handle it today, and there is nothing you need to do afterwards.

Notice what the message does not do. It never raises the review, and it asks for nothing in return.

There is more on structure and tone in our Yelp review response guide, and the version for reviews that are not complaints is in our positive review response examples.

"They said they'll remove it if I refund them"

Fix the problem. Tell the customer what you did. Then leave the review alone. Do not ask them to delete it, do not ask them to change it, and do not let the refund read as a trade. Yelp's policy says you cannot offer incentives for users to remove reviews, and a Compensated Activity Alert is far more visible than the review you were trying to lose.

The US legal position is finer than most articles claim. The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), in effect since 21 October 2024, does not itself ban paying a customer to take a review down. FTC staff guidance says so in terms, then says paying consumers to change or remove truthful negative reviews "may violate the FTC Act as an unfair or deceptive act or practice". What the rule bans outright is compensation conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, and unfounded legal threats or intimidation used to get a review removed. Knowing violations can carry civil penalties.

The same guidance sets out the permitted version: nothing in the rule stops you contacting a customer who posted a negative review in order to resolve the problem they reported. Resolve it, say what you did, and stop there. If they update what they wrote, that is their call and yours to stay out of. Many will not, and you have to be able to live with that before you pick up the phone.

When a Yelp review is defamation, and when the legal route is a mistake

Opinions are not defamation, however unfair they feel. A false statement of fact, presented as fact and causing real harm, may be. That line is narrower than most owners assume, and Yelp will not draw it for you, because it does not take sides in factual disputes.

Its escalation path, from Will Yelp remove a false or defamatory review?, is specific. If your report is declined and you then obtain "a final order from a court of competent jurisdiction explaining why a review is defamatory", you contact Yelp's support team with it. A court order first, then removal. Not a solicitor's letter, and not a threat.

Yelp defends reviewers in public. Of 4,267 user accounts subject to legal demands in the US in 2025, it says it avoided producing account information in 99% of cases, so unmasking an anonymous reviewer is a fight on its own. It flags businesses it believes are misusing the legal system, and the FTC rule names unfounded legal threats as review suppression, while confirming that a threat with a legitimate basis is fine.

Then there is the cost, the months, and the way a lawsuit draws far more attention to a review than the review would ever have earned alone. For a genuinely defamatory statement causing measurable damage, take legal advice in your own jurisdiction. For a one-star that stung, the reply above is the better investment. Our guide to removing negative reviews from Google sets out the same report-then-legal framework in more detail, and it applies here.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Frequently asked questions

Can a business remove a Yelp review?

No. A business can report a review and ask Yelp's moderators to remove it under the content guidelines, but the decision is Yelp's. Businesses cannot delete reviews themselves, cannot pay to have them removed, and cannot influence which reviews the recommendation software shows.

How long does Yelp take to remove a review?

Yelp says a reported review is evaluated by its moderators and that this may take several days. The decision arrives by email at the address registered to your account. Meanwhile, hovering over the flag icon beside the review shows whether it is still being assessed or has been declined.

How much does it cost to remove a Yelp review?

Nothing. Claiming your page, reporting a review and replying are all free, and Yelp sells no removal or appeal product. Agencies charge for filing the same report you can file yourself, and none of them decides the outcome. Paying a reviewer to delete a review breaches Yelp's policy.

Can you pay to have a bad Yelp review removed?

No. Yelp says advertisers get no preferential treatment beyond the ads they buy, and that no employee can override the recommendation software. Paying a reviewer is worse than useless: it breaches Yelp's guidelines and can earn your page a public Compensated Activity Alert that every visitor sees.

Why did my Yelp review disappear?

Almost always because Yelp's automated recommendation software stopped recommending it, not because anyone removed it. In 2025, 17% of the 22 million reviews contributed to Yelp were not recommended. They stay readable behind a link at the foot of the page but do not count towards the rating.

Can you sue over a Yelp review?

You can sue over a false statement of fact that causes real harm, though not over an opinion. Yelp acts on a final court order, not on a threat, and it flags businesses it believes are using legal threats to intimidate reviewers. The FTC rule in effect since 21 October 2024 prohibits unfounded legal threats used to suppress a review.