Yelp manipulates reviews
Yelp has repeatedly demonstrated unethical behavior toward small businesses by manipulating reviews and ratings to pressure them into advertising. Given their track record of filtering positive reviews for non-advertisers.
Extortion-Like Sales Tactics – Businesses report sudden review suppression after refusing ads.
Unfair Filtering – Legitimate 5-star reviews vanish if the business is not paying.
Lack of Accountability – Yelp denies wrongdoing, but the pattern is undeniable.
A lot of businesses alleging extortion-like tactics by Yelp, favoring businesses that advertise with them, leading to the hiding of positive reviews for non-advertisers.
Yelp’s practices are against any business standards as their filtering system often hides positive reviews and displays negative ones more prominently for businesses that don’t advertise. This unfairly harms the reputation of small businesses.
Many businesses have been complaining that Yelp had been calling and asking to advertise for extraordinary prices and once the business did not want to spend money on Yelp, most of the business good reviews were hidden and not accounted for in rating.
Yelp’s filtering algorithm disproportionately impacts small businesses, reducing their average star rating.
Transparency Over Manipulation
At Factory Plaza, we believe in honest, unfiltered feedback from our customers. That’s why we do not promote or support Yelp as a review platform. Thousands of small businesses—including ours—have experienced unfair treatment, hidden positive reviews, and questionable filtering tactics by Yelp, especially when a business chooses not to advertise with them.
Instead, we encourage our customers to read and leave reviews on trusted, transparent platforms that value fairness and accountability:
Google Reviews
Trustpilot
Facebook Recommendations
Better Business Bureau (BBB)
Houzz
HomeAdvisor / Angi
These platforms allow real customer experiences to be seen and shared without manipulation. Your feedback means the world to us—and it helps other homeowners and builders make informed decisions.
Yelp’s model appears designed to exploit small businesses, using their own customer feedback as a weapon against them unless they pay up. This undermines trust in online reviews and highlights the need for alternative, fairer platforms.
