Yelp is the platform people in Britain mostly notice when they're abroad and it is the platform people in America argue about most loudly. Its recommendation algorithm — the famous "filter" — decides which reviews count toward a business's score, and that single design decision produces most of the conversation around it.
Yelp is an open-posting local business review platform. Reviewers create accounts, leave reviews, and over time build a public profile that the platform uses to weight their contributions. The recommendation software — Yelp's automated filter — decides which reviews are shown by default ("Recommended") and which are tucked behind an extra click ("Not currently recommended"). The score on a Yelp business page is calculated only from recommended reviews.
Yelp's commercial product is largely advertising: paid placements at the top of category and competitor pages, branded business profiles, custom call-to-action buttons. Yelp does not charge businesses to claim a profile or to receive reviews. It does charge for visibility and promotional features — and in the US, the relationship between advertising and visibility has been the subject of long-running public debate.
In the UK, Yelp is a smaller but still active player, particularly in London for restaurants, bars and personal services.
Yelp is the only platform where a reviewer can describe a single bowl of ramen with the literary ambition of a Booker Prize entry, and then have the review hidden behind a button labelled "Not currently recommended" for reasons no human will ever explain. The platform has cultivated a particular type of reviewer — the Yelp Elite — and a particular type of sentence, which begins "I usually don't write reviews, but…" and continues for six paragraphs.
Yelp is genuinely useful in dense urban categories where the sample is large and the reviewer base is active. The reading habit that pays off is clicking through to "not currently recommended" — sometimes the filtered reviews are obvious one-off rants, but sometimes they are texture the headline score has flattened.
For UK readers, Yelp is most useful when researching London hospitality. For UK businesses, it is rarely the first platform to invest in, but it should be claimed and monitored.
Yelp's automated software flags reviews it judges less reliable — for example, from new accounts, or with unusual patterns — and excludes them from the calculated score. The reviews remain visible, but require an extra click.
Yelp publishes that advertising does not change the score. Advertising can change where a business appears in category and search results.
Smaller than in the US, but active — particularly in London hospitality.
Yelp Elite is a community programme recognising active, high-quality reviewers based on volume, content quality and platform engagement.
Yes, both publicly and privately, through Yelp for Business.