Yelp’s Content Use Policy

Introduction

This policy explains what happens when you write a review, upload a video or photo, or otherwise contribute content publicly on Yelp — and how Yelp protects that content while, where appropriate, making it available to others. Yelp's mission is to connect consumers with great local businesses by giving them access to reliable and useful information, which shapes everything in this policy. See our Privacy Policy for full details. Have questions? Visit our Support Center.
 

Yelp is a Forum for the Public

Yelp is designed to be open to the public. Most of what's on Yelp — reviews, photos, videos, business information, user profiles, and other content — is visible to anyone with an internet connection, with or without a Yelp account. Accurate, accessible information helps consumers make better-informed decisions and helps great local businesses thrive.

You can choose how much you participate. You can browse Yelp without an account, and you can have an account without writing a review or contributing other content. But if you do post publicly on Yelp, you are making that content available to others to learn about your consumer experience.

We Do Not Sell or License Your Personal Information or Other Non-Public Data

Millions of consumers, small business owners, and enterprise brands rely on Yelp for their most important decisions. That’s why we work hard to provide industry-leading data quality across a broad range of business categories. We do not sell or license your personal information, or other non-public information, including:

• Account details such as your email address, phone number, IP address or other personal identifiers
• Direct messages exchanged with businesses or other consumer users
• Previously-public content that was removed at the time of licensing
• Browsing or transaction history

Yelp may share information, including information that identifies you, with third parties to perform services or fulfill your requests, or as otherwise directed by you. You trust us with your data, and we take that seriously. For a complete description of how data may be shared with third parties, see our Privacy Policy.

We Fight the Misuse of Content Contributed to Yelp

Yelp’s platform exists to connect people with great local businesses, not to be harvested for unauthorized and questionable purposes. Unfortunately, bad actors increasingly use scraping tools, data brokers, and other unauthorized means to collect content from Yelp in bulk — often to train AI models or build competing products — with no regard for consumer protection, accuracy or privacy.

Scraping outdated or cached Yelp content that does not reflect real-time updates risks misinforming users about businesses and undermining the reliability Yelp strives to maintain. Our Consumer Alerts program, for example, provides transparency when suspicious or misleading activity is detected, and outdated cached content simply cannot account for these safeguards. Similarly, our automated recommendation software looks at hundreds of factors, including various measurements of quality, reliability, and user activity of reviewers on Yelp. Applying uniform criteria, the software decides which reviews should be recommended—filtering out potentially unreliable reviews, like those that may be solicited, come from an unfairly biased source (like a business owner or employee) or are written by users we just don’t know enough about. The reviews that are recommended for any business can change over time as Yelp’s software learns more about the reviewer and the business.

To fight against this misuse, Yelp uses a variety of other technological measures to control access to Yelp’s platform and services, works with a bot and agent control vendor and requires those who access the platform to comply with our web-crawling instructions located at robots.txt. While we support the use of Yelp as a forum for the public, public doesn't mean free for any use, without limits.

To further protect our community, Yelp enters into formal agreements that govern how contributions to Yelp can be accessed and used. These arrangements give others reliable, enterprise-grade access to content contributed to Yelp — the same reviews and other consumer-oriented content you see on the platform — while enabling Yelp to:

• Know who is accessing our content and for what purpose
• Restrict prohibited uses that could spread misinformation or harm consumers
• Require that deleted content is promptly removed from others’ systems.
• Ensure that update-to-date information is available for display and that stale, incorrect, or unreliable information is not.

Yelp may make the public content contributions of our users available to third parties, including developers and data licensees, who typically include:

• Businesses and brands monitoring customer sentiment
• AI and technology companies that agree to adhere to our data protection guidelines
• Academic researchers studying consumer behavior, local economies, or platform trust.

Protections We Require

Every agreement we make includes strict, enforceable restrictions. Licensees may not:

• Continue using or displaying deleted content (beyond a limited-time cache) or content that has been removed from the most recent daily feed
• Use content to spam, harass, or harm any Yelp user or business
• Modify or alter any part of the Yelp content
• Use Yelp content for any purpose that may violate any law or regulation
• Exploit Yelp content to promote any products, services or materials that constitute, promote or are used primarily for spyware, adware and/or other malicious programs or code.

How to Remove Your Content from Yelp

Yelp is open to the public by design — but you're always in control of your own participation. If you'd prefer to limit your public visibility:

• Remove specific reviews, photos, or videos. Removed content is no longer publicly visible on Yelp. See: How to remove a review. You can also edit your review instead of removing it (within 30 days of posting it), or post a review update if you want to share a newer experience you had with the business.
• Close your account. Closing your user account will remove any content you've posted (reviews, photos, video, etc.) to Yelp as a consumer, and once your account has been closed it cannot always be restored. See: How to close your Yelp account.

Note: We cannot guarantee that third parties who copied Yelp content without authorization have deleted it. We can only enforce deletions on authorized users of Yelp content.

For a full picture of how Yelp collects and uses your data, please review our Privacy Policy. To learn more about our ongoing trust and safety efforts, visit trust.yelp.com.

 

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Last updated: May 2026