Yelp Inc.

Who founded Yelp? Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, two former PayPal employees, founded Yelp in 2004 in San Francisco. Stoppelman remains CEO; Simmons left in 2010.

How does Yelp make money? Primarily by selling advertising to local businesses through cost-per-click ads and enhanced business pages. It also earns subscription revenue from Yelp Guest Manager and licensing fees from its data APIs.

Does Yelp own a reservation platform? Yes. Yelp Guest Manager is its subscription front-of-house suite for restaurants, combining reservations, waitlists, and seating management. It descends from the SeatMe acquisition of 2013 and the earlier Yelp Reservations product.

Did Google try to buy Yelp? Reported talks in 2009 valued Yelp around $550 million, but the company walked away and later went public in 2012. Yelp has since supported antitrust actions against Google's local search practices.

Where is Yelp headquartered? 350 Mission Street in San Francisco, California, a tower it purchased in 2021.

Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp in 2004 after leaving PayPal. The original idea was an automated email referral system for local recommendations; users ignored the mechanic but loved writing reviews directly, so the founders rebuilt the site around unsolicited public reviews. Max Levchin's incubator provided early funding.

Yelp grew quickly in San Francisco and expanded city by city across the United States, then into Canada, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. It raised money from Bessemer Venture Partners and others, rejected a reported $550 million acquisition offer from Google in 2009, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2012 at $15 per share.

The company bought the reservation startup SeatMe in 2013 and folded it into what became Yelp Reservations, later bundled with waitlist and host tools into Yelp Guest Manager. It also bought delivery service Eat24 in 2015 and sold it to Grubhub two years later for $287.5 million.

The late 2010s were difficult. Revenue growth slowed, activist investors pushed for change, and a 2019 settlement added five new board members. The pandemic hit restaurant advertising hard in 2020, but Yelp recovered by shifting its sales focus toward services categories such as home improvement and professional services, which now generate more advertising revenue than restaurants. In 2024 it bought RepairPal for about $80 million, and FY2025 revenue reached a record $1.46 billion.

Yelp operates a relatively low-footprint software business and publishes diversity and inclusion reporting. Its foundation funds local community organizations, and the company has faced public questions about remote work costs after announcing plans to vacate large parts of its San Francisco headquarters.

Yelp has faced long-running accusations that it manipulates review visibility to pressure businesses into buying ads, an allegation the company denies and that courts have largely rejected. In 2014 the Ninth Circuit ruled that Yelp could lawfully choose how to order reviews even if that ordering influenced businesses.

Review authenticity remains a structural issue. Yelp runs a recommendation filter that hides a large share of submitted reviews and pursues occasional lawsuits against fake-review brokers. It also sued Google alongside other plaintiffs arguing that Google's local search self-preferencing harms competitors, and it has been a vocal participant in antitrust debates around search.