

Yelp has done a poor job of communicating their policy on how businesses can ask for reviews. This can have a tremendous impact on a company’s star rating. Additionally, you (and other employees) can add them as a friend and mark their reviews as useful and cool.Īt scale, we’ve found a strategic approach to de-filtering positive reviews is able to pull ~20 percent of 5-star reviews out of the filter. If you can identify the customer who left a positive review in the filter, you can reach out to them and let them know their great review is being hidden because they aren’t active on Yelp. The key phrase here - and what you can actually do something about - is “user activity.” Often times, those reviewers relegated to the filter have just a handful of reviews and minimal friends on the site. More often than not, those useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community.
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We know that the filter is fluid, so even if a review initially goes to the filter, it can be pulled back out.Ĭombine this fact with what Yelp says in their explanation video, and you can start to build a strategy:Įvery Yelp review is automatically evaluated by Yelp’s recommendation software based on quality, reliability, and user activity on Yelp. Those lost 5-star reviews are painful however, when something slips into the filter, all hope is not lost. The filter can be a blessing and a curse on one hand, some of your great reviews can slip into the filter, but, on the other hand, some of your 1-stars might slip into it, too. To find these filtered reviews, scroll to the bottom of the page and find the light gray text referencing them:

This does not impact the overall Yelp score. These reviews are stuck down in a “not recommended” section, causing them to no longer be (easily) visible. Many reviews come into Yelp, appear on the page for a day or two, and then disappear. The Yelp Filter is the most frustrating part of Yelp for many business owners, so let’s address it first. Here are five facts about Yelp that, if understood and embraced, can morph that despair into determination to turn Yelp into a positive asset that helps the business. Yelp is not a black box, but rather a nuanced platform that you can navigate to your advantage. We work with many multi-location and franchise businesses every day to improve Yelp presences, and I can say definitively that the despair is often unnecessary. At best, business owners are frustrated with the volume of sales calls they receive at worst, they are on the receiving end of a number of negative reviews they don’t know to handle. The mere mention of the controversial company’s name generates a range of emotions - often times negative with a tinge of despair.

If you ever want to hear a business owner rant, just grab some popcorn and casually bring up Yelp.
