Looking back on 2022
Prioritizing trust is about making significant investments to maintain the integrity and quality of content on our platform. Our Trust & Safety Report provides a comprehensive overview of the steps we took to safeguard the community and level the playing field for all businesses by surfacing the most reliable and useful content on Yelp.
Recommending the most helpful and reliable reviews
In 2022, approximately 21 million reviews were contributed to Yelp, up 3% from 2021. Yelp’s automated recommendation software regularly analyzes all reviews, reviewers and businesses using hundreds of signals and billions of data points to evaluate the usefulness and reliability of each review.
Combating compensated and incentivized reviews
Yelp strictly prohibits offering incentives or other compensation in exchange for writing, changing or removing a review. To help mitigate against this activity, we issued 415+ warnings to businesses, placed 490+ Compensated Activity Alerts and Suspicious Review Activity Alerts on business pages, closed 1,740+ user accounts for being associated with review rings, and more.
Learn more about how Yelp’s User Operations team moderates content
Providing reliable information about reproductive health services
In 2022, we continued to make critical health and safety information easily accessible on Yelp by more clearly identifying Crisis Pregnancy Centers to help consumers avoid potential deception. Our User Operations team also manually evaluated reproductive health service business pages and recategorized as Crisis Pregnancy Centers those that did not provide actual abortion services or referrals to such services.
Learn more about how Yelp’s User Operations team moderates content
Removing content that violates Yelp’s policies
Yelp’s User Operations team investigates content and platform activity through proactive and reactive moderation efforts. In 2022, they removed 26,500+ reviews for policy violations, including threats, lewdness or hate speech. They also verified each new business page submitted to Yelp, rejecting 32,800+ potential new business pages for being associated with spammy behaviors in violation of Yelp’s policies.
Learn more about how Yelp’s User Operations team moderates content
Alerting our community of abnormal activity and attempts to mislead them
We publish Consumer Alerts on business pages to warn users when we detect abnormal activity or find evidence of extreme attempts to manipulate a business’s ratings and reviews.
In 2022, the most common alert we published was our Media Attention Alerts, which resulted in the removal of 74,500+ reviews. We place these alerts when a business, after gaining public attention, receives an influx of Yelp reviews that do not reflect first-hand experiences.
Protecting consumers from abuses of the legal system
Legal demands can be used to silence consumers, which is why Yelp often objects to them when they seek personal user account information. In 2022, Yelp avoided producing information related to 97% of user accounts that were the subject of legal demands from private parties and 84% of user accounts that were the subject of legal demands from law enforcement and government agencies.
Learn more about Yelp’s efforts to protect users’ personal data
Protecting the integrity of our content is about keeping Yelp useful and safe
Learn more about how we are safeguarding the information on Yelp.
