How to remove a Yelp review
Yelp is the hardest of the major platforms, and knowing why changes what you should attempt.
Report the review through your Yelp business account against a specific Content Guideline breach, such as a conflict of interest, no genuine consumer experience, or personal attacks. Yelp is notably more resistant than Google and does not remove reviews for being unfair. It also actively penalises businesses that solicit reviews, so the usual outweighing tactic carries risk here.
Why Yelp behaves differently
Yelp's recommendation software decides which reviews are displayed and which are pushed to a separate "not currently recommended" section. That filter is automated, opaque, and not something you can appeal into.
This means a review can effectively disappear from your page without being removed at all, and a review you desperately want filtered can remain recommended for years. Understanding the filter matters more than understanding the report form. See why Yelp reviews disappear.
The grounds worth citing
- Conflict of interest: a competitor, a former employee, or someone with a personal relationship to the business.
- No genuine consumer experience: the reviewer never actually transacted with you.
- Personal attacks or threats aimed at a named individual.
- Content unrelated to the consumer experience, such as political commentary.
- Private information, including anything identifying another customer.
What not to do on Yelp specifically
Do not ask customers for reviews. Yelp explicitly discourages solicitation and its filter tends to suppress solicited reviews, so the standard advice of outweighing a bad review with good ones works less well here and can backfire.
Do not respond publicly in anger. Yelp replies are prominent and frequently screenshotted. If you must respond, the approach in how to respond to a negative Google review applies equally.
On Yelp, the review you can see is a filtering decision as much as a publishing one.
Common questions
Does paying for Yelp advertising help remove reviews?
No. Advertising and review moderation are separate, and Yelp is explicit that advertisers get no moderation advantage.
Can I get my Yelp page removed entirely?
Generally no. Yelp pages can be created without the business's involvement and are not removed on request.
Is the not-recommended section visible to the public?
Yes, behind a link at the bottom of the page, and those reviews do not count toward your displayed rating.
Find out if it can come down.
The scan is free and confidential. You get a viability answer on each item, a fixed price, and a timeline. Anything accepted and still published at 14 days is refunded in full.
Run a free scanMore on yelp and review platforms
Working through this for a business? See Reputation management for restaurants.