u/CompletelyMoronic

Just officially cancelled my Yelp Ads, Upgrades, and Nearby Jobs messaging today.

As a small business owner, customer trust and social proof are everything. I’ve been paying out-of-pocket for ad campaigns and customer messaging leads, assuming that driving traffic to my Yelp page would help convert incoming inquiries.

Recently, I went through my profile metrics and realized that Yelp’s automated recommendation software has been filtering and hiding over 50% of my legitimate, organic 5-star reviews from actual paying customers.
Paying to send prospective clients to a profile where half of my real customer reviews are hidden—making the business look less established than it actually is—completely kills lead conversion. When I reached out to support to ask for a manual review of these genuine client reviews or an account adjustment, I got nothing but automated canned responses.

I’ve formally cancelled all paid services, documented everything, and submitted reports to the BBB and FTC regarding the discrepancy between paying for placement and having organic trust signals suppressed.
Has anyone else seen a massive hit to conversion on paid messaging/ads due to review filtering? How are other local services shifting their ad budget away from Yelp?

Never ever try Yelp for Business, they will offer you free trial with Yelp Ad and Upgrade package all together but once you cancel your free trial before end date even, they will only cancel it half 😠 This is the way they make mone, they will keep your Yelp ad and only cancel your upgrade package. They will keep charging you money every day until you see in your bank transaction. They even don’t email you about charging you money. This is a trap, they’re using this trick to make more money. Their Customer Support team is not supporting at all. They will not listen you, they just keep saying same things over you. Yelp is not doing correct thing with customer, they are promoting misleading information and making mone. STOP this. Don’t make fool of your customers.

I 100% regret adding my business to Yelp so before I add it to the BBB as suggested for SEO, I wanted to hear other business owners’ experience with the platform. Anything I should know?

Very new business owner here! I recently signed up for yelp and was contacted by their marketing people to set up my ads. I naively thought it was part of the set up process. Something felt “off” immediately when setting it up. They said they would give me a “$900 bonus” if I stuck it out for a couple of months. I couldn’t afford the limit they were going to give me that bonus at, so I left it at that. Then, thankfully I came on here and read all the terrible reviews(ironically) on them! My question is, has it actually worked for some of you?
Btw! I canceled the yelp ad, the updates and their verified license. Like I said I’m very new to all this, it’s wild how predatory they can be.

What is it even for anymore? For some reason it still has residual use when people go to other places for search, but how long will that last? Their pay-to-play model has alienated small business owners, so no one will bemoan this dinosaur after it goes extinct.

Long story short, I made the mistake of listening to the yelp sales agent WHO LIED to me and said that I wouldn't be charged for my free $200 yelp ads credit.

So I put a single use virtual credit card. The pre-authed and failed. I cancelled the subscription - at least I thought. But it turned out that 'free' $200 yelp credit wasn't free. So they tried to charge me and rolled a bill for months even after my refusals.

Now they are threatening to send me to collections for a $330 bill LOL.

My thought is, I will just pay the bill and dispute it with my credit card, to be honest. But I wouldn't mind wasting Yelp's time.

We had a horrendous experience with Yelp and would strongly recommend that new businesses do not use their paid services or upgrades.

What starts as a sales pitch for an upgrade can turn into constant charges and a frustrating cancellation process. They have multiple upgrades/add-ons, and when you try to cancel, you can be told that each upgrade must be cancelled separately. On top of that, they may require cancellation notice a month in advance, meaning you can continue getting charged even after you’ve decided you want out.

For a new business, every dollar matters. The last thing you need is a company making it difficult to stop recurring charges.

Our experience was extremely frustrating, and in our opinion, Yelp’s services are simply not worth the money or the headache.

⚠️ NEW BUSINESS OWNERS: SAVE YOUR MONEY AND STAY AWAY FROM YELP.

There are much better ways to spend your marketing budget.

Hi everyone, I really need some advice from the community or any Yelp moderators who might be lurking here.

Recently, our business was hit with a 1-star review on Yelp. The frustrating part? This person never actually hired us. They simply reached out asking for a quote, we provided it, and they felt the price was too high. And the reviewer clearly stated that in the review itself. Instead of just moving on or declining, they went straight to our Yelp page and dropped a 1-star rating solely based on the price quote. And never tested the price against the actual service we provide.

It feels incredibly unfair that our overall rating—which we work so hard to maintain by doing great work for our actual clients—can be dragged down by someone who never even experienced the quality of our service.

I know Yelp’s Content Guidelines say a review must be based on a "first-hand consumer experience." Does simply asking for a price genuinely count as a consumer experience even when no service is rendered?

Has any other business owner dealt with this specific issue successfully? I want to report the review, but I’m worried the automated system will just instantly reject the claim. Is there a specific reporting category or approach I should use to get a human moderator to look at this and realize how unreasonable it is?

Thanks in advance for any support or guidance!

I am past the point of wanting another explanation from Yelp management. I want them gone. The stock is around $21-$22, down from $47.34 at the end of 2023, despite nearly $2 billion of historical repurchases and a float that has been ground down to roughly 52.5 million shares. They have spent years buying the stock, retiring an enormous number of shares and telling shareholders about all the value they are creating, while the actual value of a Yelp share has been obliterated. If you can dramatically shrink the denominator and the stock still gets cut in half, perhaps the problem is no longer the denominator. Perhaps it is the people running the company.

And every time Yelp disappoints, there seems to be another explanation that conveniently originates somewhere outside Yelp. Restaurants are struggling. The consumer is weak. Input costs are high. Gas costs are high. Inflation. Tariff uncertainty. People aren't eating out as much. Weather and seasonality. Then this year David Schwarzbach actually pointed to the “conflict in the Middle East” as a reason advertiser budgets softened in March. Iran. We are now at the stage where a local advertising company headquartered in San Francisco is explaining its numbers partly through a Middle East war. Maybe every one of these things had some incremental effect. That is not the point. The point is that after enough years, enough quarters and enough outside explanations, management starts sounding like the guy who has a different reason every month why the rent is late. At some point the answer can simply be: you aren't doing a very good job.

The really insulting part is that there is apparently no comparable economic cycle for executive compensation. Jeremy Stoppelman received $10.26 million of reported compensation in 2025 and has $8.89 million of target compensation for 2026. Jed Nachman, who oversees sales, marketing and administration, has a 2026 target of about $4.92 million. Schwarzbach is around $4.82 million. Yelp likes to describe executive pay as heavily “at risk,” but half of target equity is plain RSUs that vest with time. Apparently shareholders get performance risk while management gets retention risk. The stock can go from $47 to $21, management can explain that restaurants are having a hard time and there is a war thousands of miles away, and everyone upstairs continues collecting compensation packages that would suggest they are running one of the great compounders in America.

Then look at the capital allocation. Yelp repurchased $292 million of stock in 2025, another $175 million in the first half of 2026 and another $25 million in July. It spent roughly $271 million acquiring Hatch, drew $100 million on its revolver and then paused the buyback so it could pay the revolver down. So after years of telling us Yelp shares were worth buying, they managed to reduce financial flexibility right around the time the stock became cheaper than almost all of those purchases. I hope Hatch is spectacular, because this team has certainly paid itself as though it knows exactly what it is doing.

I don't need Yelp to discover some magical new KPI. I don't care about another slide showing Yelp Assistant engagement or another conference appearance where management explains that Other Revenue is exciting. Yelp is a profitable company with a famous brand, valuable local data, substantial cash generation, licensing opportunities, Hatch, Host and a tiny share count. Yet the market assigns the whole thing a garbage valuation because nobody seems to trust what management will do with the assets. That is fixable. Fire the people who have presided over the collapse, bring in adults whose compensation actually depends on making shareholders money, put every asset and expense on the table and tell the new CEO he has twelve months to prove Yelp belongs as an independent public company. If not, sell it. The easiest way for YELP to go up may have nothing to do with Iran, tariffs, restaurant traffic, gas prices or the next AI feature. It may simply be Jeremy Stoppelman and this management team leaving.s

Everyone who has owned a small business knows the torture, aggravation and general annoyance of being bombarded by yelp's army of sh|tty telemarketers. Their whole executive team should be fired especially whoever is running sales and marketing. They are morons who don't know the right way to monetize a dominant market position as reflected by their stock price.

Today, I learned that they're even more r******* than I could've imagined. Our company needed to do an integration that required a Yelp api subscription. So, we try to create an account so that we can buy an api subscription. The stupid hcaptcha kept accusing me of being a bot and looping back to a challenge puzzle before eventually refusing to proceed. Then when I try to report the bug to yelp's dev team, the f*****g form is also blocked by hcaptcha. Yelp is a 2 decade old company the seems like it run by junior executives who hire only sh|tty junior engineers. They don't know how to sell and they aren't smart enough to take the money when someone is trying to give them money.

I manage a wine bar, and I was solicited to pay for their marketing package. Two days after I declined, I received our first negative review in over three years. It's possible we received a bad review, but the timing is suspicious. Has anyone else experienced something like this?

Why do I have to be signed in to be able to view content on the site and why are users being prompted to use the Yelp app rather than being able to access the information directly through the website!

I’m sure you guys heard this a lot but i’m adding to the pile.

This lady from yelp calls me trying to give me free credit. She starts with $300 in free credit, then the next day calls be back saying there’s a $900 boost i should get, just apply this promo code it won’t charge you. So i did it.

She told me set $15 a day limit and I asked if it would it charge my actual card and she said no they said a charge to test your card but they refund it.

Now I woke up to a $140 charge…

i’m sure it was in the terms & conditions hidden somewhere but this was so deceptive to do and especially a big company like yelp I expect way better.

🫩

Has anyone else had Yelp filter almost half their reviews?

I own a small business and right now we have 21 visible/recommended reviews and 18 sitting in “not recommended.” They’re all positive and from real customers, and some even have photos.

Yelp basically told me their system automatically filters reviews based on different signals, and one thing that seems to matter is whether the reviewer has a lot of other activity/reviews on Yelp.

What’s frustrating is that while so many of our positive reviews are getting filtered, all of our negative reviews have made it through.

One of the negative reviews was also factually wrong. They said there were 3 people working when we literally never have 3 people working at once.

I even compared my page to a few similar businesses in my area, and their filtered review numbers were way lower than mine, which is part of why this feels so off.

I reached out to Yelp because the number of filtered reviews already seemed really high, and after I brought it up, I noticed about 8 more positive reviews get moved into “not recommended.”

I don’t pay for Yelp ads or have a paid account. I’m not saying I know why it’s happening, I just genuinely don’t understand how almost half our reviews are getting filtered while every negative one stays visible.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Did you ever get a real answer from Yelp or figure out how to escalate it?

Yelp’s stock has taken a beating over the last 3 years. While the S&P 500 reached record highs this year, Yelp continues to lose value. Over the last 36 months (NYSE:YELP) has dropped 45% and company insiders continue to sell their holdings. Some have compared Yelp to AOL.com, MySpace, Yahoo…CEO Jeremy Stoppelman admits the company has customer retention issues, and they’ve seen a decrease in revenue collected from restaurants (their largest revenue generator) for 6 straight quarters. Attempts to expand abroad were abandoned due to lack of interest, and studies show consumers are utilizing the platform less and less. Is this the end of Yelp? Will it be seen as the Blockbuster video of online reviews in the near future?

I’m sure every experienced restaurant owner feels this way about Yelpers.