Yelp Tactics

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.