Yelp

Local business reviews and search app whose real business is advertising and first party lead data

As of 1 September 2026, Yelp is free to use. A crowdsourced local business review and search app, free to browse and review, that makes its money by selling advertising and lead placement to the businesses being reviewed. Softwr lists it under Utilities. Yelp is made by Yelp Inc., available on iOS, Android, Web.

Visit siteVisit Yelp

Overview

What Yelp does

Yelp lets users search for local businesses such as restaurants, contractors and services, read and write reviews, book reservations or appointments where integrated, and message businesses directly. The consumer-facing app is free with no subscription and no in-app purchases for reviewers. The honest description of the model is that consumers are the product Yelp sells to businesses, not the customer paying for it. Yelp's revenue comes overwhelmingly from advertising sold to local businesses, including paid placement that can put a competitor's ad on a business's own listing page, and from lead generation products such as Yelp Ads and Request a Quote. Businesses that decline to advertise can still be reviewed and ranked by Yelp's algorithm, and Yelp has faced long-running complaints and litigation from business owners alleging that ad sales pressure and review filtering are connected, which Yelp denies. Buyers of the app, in the sense of end users, get free search and reviews. The businesses being listed are the actual paying customers, and the trade-off for them is that visibility on a platform their customers already use for discovery comes with an advertising cost.

What people use it for

Finding a nearby restaurant or service and reading recent customer reviews before visiting
Booking a table at a restaurant that uses Yelp for reservations
Requesting quotes from local contractors or service providers for a specific job
Checking a business's current hours, menu or photos before going

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Yelp.

Its revenue model depends on selling advertising and leads to the same businesses being reviewed, which creates a structural tension over how neutral rankings and filtered reviews really are.
Businesses can pay to have a competitor's ad appear on their own listing page, a practice that has drawn sustained criticism from small business owners.
Yelp's review filtering algorithm is not disclosed in detail, so businesses cannot audit why some reviews are filtered out as unreliable and others are not.
Review quality varies widely by category and city, with restaurants and nightlife much better covered than niche trades in smaller markets.
Consumer data such as searches and saved lists feeds Yelp's advertising and lead products sold to businesses, which is the actual monetisation even though the app itself is free.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Yelp

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Yelpvs
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor: If you want reviews focused on travel and hospitality rather than general local business

Pricing

What Yelp costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Consumer app

Free

Free search, reviews and reservations

Capabilities

Features

Business search and reviews
Search and filter local businesses by category, rating and distance, with user reviews
Reservations and waitlist
Book a table or join a waitlist at participating restaurants
Yelp Guest Manager listings
Businesses appear with wait times and booking where they use Yelp's restaurant tools
Request a Quote
Consumers post a job request that gets pushed to paying service businesses as a lead
Photos and menus
User-submitted and business-submitted photos and menu information
Collections and lists
Save and organise favourite places into shareable lists

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Does Yelp cost anything to use as a reviewer?

No, browsing and writing reviews is free with no subscription.

How does Yelp actually make money?

From advertising and lead generation products sold to local businesses, not from consumers.

Can a business pay to remove negative reviews?

No, Yelp states paying for ads does not remove or bury negative reviews, though critics have long disputed how independent the ranking and filtering process really is.

Keep looking

Where to go from Yelp

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Yelp, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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