How to Review Yelp

A weathered stone monument with a brushed-metal dedication plaque engraved YELP and a row of five stars, only the first filled, reading 1 out of 5 stars, defaced with red spray paint reading Yelp Sucks — The reviews Yelp deserves should stand as monuments to Yelp.

The Reviewer Gets Reviewed

Yelp reviews every business in America. Turns out you can review Yelp back.

Yelp publishes pages about businesses their owners never asked for, decides which customer reviews get shown, and sells visibility back to the businesses it grades. If you have ever wanted to return the favor, here is where it actually works.

Learn how Yelp Sucks

Yelp on Yelp

The most satisfying option first: Yelp has its own business page on Yelp. It is a real, active listing for Yelp's San Francisco headquarters, with thousands of reviews and photos — mostly one and two stars. Search for "Yelp San Francisco" on yelp.com or go straight to yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco. Your review there will be subject to Yelp's own review filter, the same one it applies to everyone else. Enjoy the symmetry.

Google Maps

Yelp's headquarters has a Google Maps listing — and in a detail worth savoring, it appears to be unclaimed and even miscategorized as a transportation service, apparently managed by nobody. You can find it by searching "Yelp Headquarters" on Google Maps, or use this direct link. Sign in with a Google account and leave a rating. The listing gets little traffic, so think of this one as a public record more than a broadcast.

A granite mountainside carved with a giant row of five stars, only the first filled, above monumental letters spelling Yelp — A grand monument that Yelp deserves.

Bing Maps and Yellow Pages

Two more venues, if you want to be thorough. Bing Maps has a listing for Yelp's headquarters; sign in with a Microsoft account and you can leave a rating. Yellow Pages carries a Yelp Inc listing rated 1.5 out of 5, and anyone can write a review there — no sign-in gymnastics required.

Trustpilot

Trustpilot is where the most sustained public criticism of Yelp lives, on two separate profiles:

Yelp the consumer site — rated "Bad" at 1.4 out of 5, from more than six thousand reviews. The recurring words in those reviews: marketing, customer service, spam, cancellation, ethics.

Yelp for Business — rated "Bad" at 1.2 out of 5. This is where business owners tell their side: ad billing they say they could not stop, leads that never materialized, and the review filter. If your experience is with Yelp's sales or billing, this is the profile that matches it.

Anyone can write on Trustpilot; you just need an account.

The app stores

The Yelp app takes ratings and reviews on the Apple App Store and Google Play. One honest caveat: these skew positive, because most raters are judging the app's usefulness, not the company's conduct. If your gripe is with Yelp's practices rather than its software, Trustpilot is the better fit.

The full moon over a dark field, its face carved with a row of five stars, only the first filled, and the word Yelp — If Yelp wants to be everywhere, let everyone see what it really is.

Better Business Bureau

Yelp has BBB profiles, and it is not BBB-accredited. Oddly, there are two: Yelp Inc. and a newer duplicate filed under Yelp.com. The BBB creates a profile whenever anyone submits a slightly different business name, and it never merged the two — so the company that polices every other business's listing can't keep its own under one roof. Either profile takes a customer review; go a step further and you can file a formal complaint, which companies are expected to respond to on the record. For billing disputes this doubles as paper documentation — see How to Fight Yelp.

The smaller aggregators

Beyond the big names, Yelp gets reviewed on SmartCustomer (1.8 out of 5 from over 1,500 reviews) and smaller complaint aggregators like ComplaintsBoard. Same genre, smaller audiences — worth a cross-post if you're already writing one.

Before you post

A few things that keep a review up and credible, wherever you post it:

Stick to what happened to you. The sales call, the bill, the review that vanished. Concrete first-hand experience is what platforms keep and readers trust; general rants get flagged, buried, or removed.

Keep receipts. Dates, amounts, screenshots. They make your review harder to dismiss and, if you ever escalate, they are the evidence.

Skip the borrowed complaints. Don't repeat things you read elsewhere. If you didn't experience it, leave it out — one verifiable story of your own outweighs ten borrowed ones.

Post it further

Social media doesn't hold your review — feeds bury it within days — but it's how people actually see it. Leave the review on Trustpilot or Yelp itself first, then link it on X or Facebook where your followers can find it. Reddit is the longer game: threads about Yelp's ad billing and its review filter in r/Yelp and r/smallbusiness rank in search results for years, so a first-hand story there outlives any tweet. Keep it to your own experience and follow each subreddit's self-promotion rules.

When a review is not enough

Reviews are public feedback, not enforcement. If Yelp billed you for something you did not want or could not cancel, the FTC complaint database and your state attorney general are the channels with actual teeth. The File a Complaint Against Yelp guide maps the four channels — card issuer, state consumer protection office, BBB, FTC — and the order to hit them in.

Petition to Dissolve Yelp

If you think businesses should have more control over how they are represented online, sign the petition to dissolve Yelp.

A giant granite monument spelling Yelp in a bare field, the last letter shattered by a wrecking ball mid-swing — Tear it down. Sign the petition!

Help make the world a better place: petition to dissolve Yelp Inc.

Petition to Dissolve Yelp →

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