Content moderation

Our User Operations team is dedicated to protecting the integrity of the content our community posts on Yelp. When a community member, business owner, or our automated systems alert our team about a potential issue, a real human reviews the case. 

Our User Operations team continuously seeks, investigates, and stops fraudulent activity through a variety of techniques, including removing bad actors from the Yelp platform.

We work hard to keep business pages relevant, local, and trustworthy. This means taking steps to check that business information on Yelp — including additions and updates to Yelp Pages that consumers, businesses, or other partners make — is accurate. Since not all types of businesses are eligible to be listed on Yelp, our team of moderators also validate each new business that is added to the platform.

When people turn to Yelp for searches that are critical and sensitive, it’s important that they find relevant information about businesses that truly offer what they’re looking for. Business categories listed on Yelp pages must accurately reflect the products and services that the business offers. Businesses are not permitted to include categories for things they don’t offer in order to attract certain consumers. 

Yelp takes steps to keep consumers from being misled in this way, including recategorizing or removing categories when we find that businesses have mislabeled themselves. For example, we manually reviewed tens of thousands of businesses that were listed on Yelp as providing abortion services and recategorized those that don’t provide abortions as “Crisis Pregnancy Centers.”