40 Yelp statistics for 2026 from Yelp's own reports
Forty Yelp statistics, every one taken from Yelp's own fast facts page, annual report or Trust and Safety Report, with the edition and the period it covers.
Lachlan Fea 11 min read
In this article10 sections
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.
| Category | Share of reviewed businesses |
|---|---|
| Home and local services | 21% |
| Restaurants | 16% |
| Shopping | 15% |
| Other | 12% |
| Beauty and fitness | 11% |
| Health | 9% |
| Auto | 7% |
| Travel and hotel | 4% |
| Arts, entertainment and events | 4% |
| Nightlife | 2% |
- 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.
| Stars | Share of individual reviews | Share of US business averages |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 55% | 16% |
| 4 | 15% | 38% |
| 3 | 7% | 26% |
| 2 | 6% | 15% |
| 1 | 18% | 5% |
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.
| Source | What it counts | Recommended | Not recommended | Removed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yelp Form 10-K, filed 27 Feb 2026 | Reviews submitted, as at 31 Dec 2025 | ~76% | ~15% | not stated |
| Yelp Fast Facts, as of 30 Jun 2026 | Reviews contributed, as at 30 Jun 2026 | 76% | 14% | 10% |
| Yelp Trust and Safety Report 2025 | The 22m reviews contributed during 2025 | 70% | 17% | 13% (11% by Yelp, 2% by the reviewer) |
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Disagreements get published, not resolved. Where Yelp's sources give different splits, the table above shows all three and says what each one counts.
- 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.