Remove a Yelp review and understand the filter
Yelp is the strictest platform about not editing content for businesses, and the most aggressive about filtering on its own. Both facts matter to what is achievable.
Can a business get a Yelp review removed?
Yelp removes reviews that breach its content guidelines — conflicts of interest, reviews not based on a personal consumer experience, threats, lewdness, hate speech, promotional content or privacy violations — reported through the business account. Yelp does not remove reviews because a business disputes the facts, and it explicitly refuses to remove reviews in exchange for payment or advertising. Separately, Yelp’s recommendation software may move a review to the "not recommended" section, where it no longer counts towards the rating.
Yelp does not remove reviews for advertisers and treats any claim otherwise as a scam signal. Anybody who tells you they have a relationship with Yelp that gets reviews pulled is lying.
Grounds Yelp enforces
- Conflict of interest — a competitor, former employee or the owner’s own circle
- No personal consumer experience: hearsay, or someone who never visited
- Content about a different location of the same brand
- Threats, harassment, lewdness or hate speech
- Private information about staff or other customers
- Promotional content or an incentivised review
How a Yelp case runs
- 1
Assessment
Guideline-by-guideline. Yelp has the narrowest grounds of the three, so the honest answer is "no case" more often here.
- 2
Evidence
Transaction records and reviewer history, assembled to show the breach.
- 3
Report
Filed from the business account against a named guideline.
- 4
Follow-up
One documented appeal where the first report is declined; beyond that, repeat reporting achieves nothing.
- 5
Proof
A screenshot showing the review gone from the recommended listing.
The specifics
- Priced
- Per review, charged only where grounds exist
- Typical timeline
- 7 to 28 days
- Also possible
- A review moved to "not recommended" stops counting towards the rating
- Counts as delivered
- The review no longer appears in the recommended reviews, evidenced by a screenshot
What we will not claim
- Yelp will not remove a review because the business disagrees with it, and advertising spend buys nothing here.
- We do not post fake positive reviews to bury a real one. It is against every platform’s terms, it is detectable, and a business caught doing it ends up worse off than the review left it.
- We cannot control Yelp’s recommendation filter. It is software, it is not appealable, and nobody outside Yelp can direct it.
- Asking customers to post positive reviews violates Yelp’s policy, so we will not build that into a strategy.
Questions
Terms on this page
Last reviewed . Platform policies change; we re-check every page quarterly.