Looking back on 2023
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.
This year’s report outlines the various ways we mitigated attempts to mislead consumers, including efforts that were orchestrated off of Yelp. You’ll learn more about our automated recommendation software, and the ways we combat compensated and incentivized reviews, including our index of Consumer Alert recipients. We detail our extensive efforts to remove inappropriate content and bad actors from our platform, which include leveraging large language models (LLMs). This year’s report also looks at how we moderate business pages that gain public attention, the actions we take to protect consumers from abuse of the legal system, and more.
Recommending the most helpful and reliable reviews
Approximately 22 million reviews were contributed to Yelp in 2023, up nearly 6% from 2022. Yelp’s automated recommendation software evaluates all reviews on our platform based on hundreds of signals of quality, reliability, and user activity on Yelp.
In 2023, to provide consumers with even more transparency when comparing businesses, Yelp began displaying numerical ratings rounded to one decimal place alongside businesses’ star ratings. The average star rating submitted by users is approximately 3.8 stars.
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.
Yelp strictly prohibits offering incentives or other compensation in exchange for writing, changing or removing a review. To help mitigate against this activity, we placed 688 Compensated Activity Alerts and Suspicious Review Activity Alerts on business pages. We also began indexing recipients of Compensated Activity Alerts and Suspicious Review Activity Alerts in 2023 to make it easier for people and regulators to identify suspicious review behaviors.
When a business gains public attention and its Yelp page sees an influx of reviews that do not reflect firsthand experiences, we may place one of our Media Attention Alerts on the page and temporarily disable the ability to post reviews. In 2023, we placed 986 Unusual Activity Alerts and Public Attention Alerts.
Removing content that violates Yelp’s policies
Yelp’s User Operations team investigates content and platform activity through proactive and reactive moderation efforts. We rely on our users to report reviews that they believe violate our policies. In 2023, we removed 28,800+ reported reviews for containing threats, lewdness, or hate speech. We also verified every new business page submitted to Yelp last year, rejecting 40,700+ potential new business pages for being associated with spammy behaviors in violation of Yelp’s policies — up 24% year-over-year.
In 2023, Yelp began using LLMs to proactively better detect reviews that may contain inappropriate content before it’s ever published to our platform. This new system flags potentially inappropriate reviews to our moderators who evaluate the content, which helps make a determination to further inform the LLM.
Learn more about how Yelp’s User Operations team moderates content →
Combating deceptive review activity on other platforms
Yelp regularly coordinates investigations to uncover deceptive review practices, including monitoring and infiltrating online groups on other platforms where people may attempt to trade or pay for reviews
In 2023, we made 1,300+ reports to other online platforms to warn them of suspicious groups, posts, or individuals on their sites attempting to trade or pay for reviews. While Yelp’s reports to other online platforms increased 23% from the previous year, action was taken on only 54% of incidents — down nearly 30% from 2022.
Learn more about how Yelp’s User Operations team moderates content →
When an account is closed due to suspected deceptive or abusive behaviors, the associated reviews are removed as well.
Protecting consumers from abuse 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 2023, Yelp avoided producing information related to 98% of user accounts that were the subject of legal demands from private parties and 96% 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 →
Learn more from previous reports and other updates
Academic research finds Yelp’s content moderation practices mitigate misinformation and build consumer trust
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Yelp publishes an index of Compensated and Suspicious Activity Consumer Alerts recipients
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FTC economist finds Google and Facebook have inflated reviews for low-quality businesses
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