Yelp helped change the game for online reviews
As we close out the year and look ahead at 2025, we wanted to mark an anniversary of sorts: 20 years ago, the online review site Yelp was launched — the name reportedly a mashup of “help” and “Yellow Pages.”
It started as an email service to send personal recommendations to your friends, then in 2005 morphed into the standalone review site we now know. Yelp wasn’t the first in the online review game, but it has been among the most popular and enduring.
Andrea Rubin has been at the company almost from the beginning. She joined in 2006 as the first community manager in Chicago. She’s now the senior vice president for community nationally.
“I absolutely loved my city and loved local businesses, and I just loved being able to share my thoughts on these local businesses through the Yelp platform,” Rubin said. “I was like, ‘Well, if I love this, I know there’s many other people who are going to love it as well.’”
Yelp has now accrued almost 300 million reviews worldwide. And the site has helped usher in our current star-saturated era, said David Godes, a marketing and economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, noting “almost all of us, almost always check reviews when we’re making a purchase.”
More than 90% of consumers do so before visiting a new business, according to a recent survey from Capital One.
But as online reviews have taken on greater weight, Godes said there’s been a greater incentive to game them.
“I guess you could think of it sort of as white hat and black hat,” Godes said.,
The white hat, ethical version would be encouraging consumers who seem satisfied to write reviews or giving them some sort of incentive to do so. The black hat, more sinister version?
“Online networks of reviewers who get paid to write fake reviews,” Godes said. “This has been documented. Using AI to generate fake reviews, for example — lots of that going on.”
Yelp uses a combination of algorithms and user reports to flag suspicious review activity so it won’t get recommended to users or factored into a business’ star rating. Content determined by moderators to be deceptive is removed, and a business page might be labeled with an alert.
On average, about 10% of online reviews are fake, according to research from Dina Mayzlin, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California.
“But I just want to point out that’s true for all social media,” Mayzlin said.
The internet is full of trolls, conspiracies and misinformation, she noted. But people mostly find ways to filter through the noise.
“I think the calculation all of us make is that there’s enough, you know, authentic, useful information out there that you still want to listen to it,” she said.
Andrea Rubin, the senior vice president of community at Yelp, said the platform has remained relevant despite increasing competition from sites like Google and Facebook, thanks in part to constant innovation.
“When the iPhone launched, we were one of the first apps on the iPhone, and a really successful app too that millions of people use now,” Rubin said. Recently, Yelp launched an AI assistant that can provide business recommendations.
But Rubin said its biggest strength is still the community of dedicated Yelpers it cultivates.
“They’re just extremely passionate about where they live and want to share it with others,” she said.
Rubin herself still writes reviews. She’s tallied thousands of them over the years.
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