My true story of being extorted by Yelp.

How Yelp is lying about who they are – and why it matters to you.  

Let me make something clear from the start – I am not a business owner trying to get negative reviews removed from my Yelp page.

I say that because typically whenever a small business owner complains about Yelp, their standard public response is that the business was just upset about “bad reviews”.

Nope, not the case here. I understand that Yelp aims to serve as a neutral platform for customers to voice their positive and negative experiences – and I’m all for it.

In fact, until very recently, I’ve had a pretty good experience on Yelp as a small business owner with almost 800 five star reviews from verified customers. Unfortunately, as of today, you can only see 193 of them.

Why? Because Yelp is holding the rest hostage until I pay up.

This is my true story of Yelp extortion:

My company, Bel Air Internet, a boutique Internet and communications provider based in Los Angeles, was founded with the mission of delivering great customer service. From the start, our goal was to do everything differently than the typical ISP’s like Spectrum and AT&T, which are not exactly known for their stellar records of customer service or reliable products. 

Instead, we aimed to deliver high-quality services with excellent customer care being one of THE defining components of our business and mission.

Over the last fourteen years, as our services have rolled out to tons of residential and commercial buildings across Southern California, our Yelp reviews have reflected our commitment to customer service. As of early February 2017, we had racked up almost 925 reviews with 800 of them being 5-star glowing reviews.

Our accumulation of five star reviews – more than any other Internet provider -- was a huge point of pride for our company and employees. Maintaining good reviews was important both because of our consumer-centric business model and because we know how valuable reviews can be to potential customers. (We have also worked persistently to garner great customer reviews on Google and Facebook, with over a 4.5 star average on both those platforms as well.)

In fact, since customer satisfaction is so essential to our business, when we hit 500 Five-star Yelp reviews, we held a huge party for our employees to celebrate – because we knew it was their dedication to our customers that got us there.

And then, the other shoe dropped…

Just as we were hovering close to reaching our next goal of 1000 five star reviews, a Yelp sales associate reached out to see if we’d like to advertise with them. We declined for various reasons, including the fact that our Yelp ratings speak volumes on their own – far more than any paid advertisement ever could.

We didn’t give it a second thought until we noticed that – suddenly – dozens of our five-star reviews were being removed from our page daily, until almost 200 had been filtered out over the course of just a few weeks.

This wasn’t the normal filtering out a few reviews that seem “fishy” for whatever reasons Yelp claims its algorithm monitors for. This was a purge of hundreds of reviews from verified customers. Some of these newly filtered reviews both old and new, were even from Elite Yelpers. These are the people that their very algorithm is meant to promote!

Something was definitely strange. I called our sales associate to ask why this was happening and what we could do to get these reviews back on our page. We suspected there was a glitch in their system. Unfortunately, this was not the case. I was told there was nothing he, or anyone at Yelp, could do, and was given no avenue for recourse. I was also given no reason for why this had suddenly happened. Instead, I was pitched on ad sales again.

Within days of this conversation, our Yelp page came under further attack, with another mass purge of 500 reviews! (More batches are still being dropped daily).  

What has quickly become clear is that Yelp wasn’t really trying to pitch us on advertising at all. This is an old-fashioned extortion racket, updated for the digital age. Essentially, Yelp is acting like the mobster on the cyber block, holding my good reviews “hostage” unless I pay up.

Yelp claims on their site that their algorithm weeds out about 25% of reviews. However, as of today we have had a staggering 87% of our reviews filtered, with no explanation for this vast discrepancy nor any possible way to get them back.

Plus, Yelp seemed to have a targeted strategy. Of the hundreds of our reviews that Yelp eliminated, they disproportionately targeted our five-star ones, effectively lowering my company’s overall rating almost a full star within a day.

The sterling reputation we had all worked years to build as a team was stolen from us in a matter of weeks.

Yelp claims all over their site that “advertisers get no special treatment”. But that’s clearly not true. In fact, over two thousand other business owners have filed complaints about Yelp to the FTC with my exact story of extortion, though the FTC has declined to act thus far. (Interestingly, many of the business owners who filed complaints did actually “pay up” at first and found their reviews magically returned to their page…only to have them “filtered” again when they didn’t up their advertising budget the next time. So much for Yelp’s neutral algorithm).

Several businesses have also brought lawsuits against Yelp for the same reason, including a class action suit. Yelp claims on their website they were found “innocent” of favoring advertisers in these lawsuits. This is also false. A bold-faced lie. (And so easily checked by simply reading the judgment).

While Yelp did succeed in winning their cases, they were hardly found “innocent” of this practice. Rather, the judge ruled that their extortion practices could be considered “hard bargaining” and were effectively legal, if not ethical or conducive to any sort of good business practice. Yelp, for obvious reasons, has not chosen to publicize this portion of the judgment on their site.

The unfortunate loser in all this – besides my business, my employees and the thousands of other small businesses with absolutely zero recourse in these matters – is ultimately the consumer.

In my case, Yelp’s hidden business model helps the worst actors in our industry (like Spectrum) who have seemingly unlimited advertising budgets, while misleading the consumer to believe its readers that they are getting the full, true story.

As of today though, I refuse to be shut down by a bully. I am adding my voice with the thousands of others. If you have a story like mine, please share below. I’d love to hear it. Let’s fight this Goliath Yelp ogre together. And for the consumers out there – beware the next time you check a review on Yelp. They’re not really the unbiased platform they claim to be.