Listings and Reviews features for Yelp are dependent on a couple of factors, including size and relationship with Yext and/or Yelp. There are three categories a business can fall under: SMB, Mutual Enterprise Client (MEC), and Yelp Knowledge customer.

Client Categories

SMB

• Listings: Only supported for accounts with fewer than 5 locations. Yelp only allows 4 locations to be active — any more is considered a chain.
• Reviews: 3 truncated (150 character) reviews per listing.

Yelp may incorrectly flag a business as a larger chain, which causes the listing to become unavailable in the dashboard. This typically happens when a business has a more generic business name. If you see this unavailable reason, reach out to your account team.

Mutual Enterprise Client (MEC)

• Listings: Only supported for clients that have a paid relationship with both Yelp and Yext. This is called the Mutual Enterprise Clients (MECs) Manual launch process with Yelp.
• Reviews: 200 full-text reviews pulled through API with real-time updates. Review Response is available as an add-on.

Why am I getting an authorization failure as an enterprise client with a paid Yelp relationship? Yext is only allowed to sync approved locations that have a paid advertising listing on Yelp. If you see a location go unavailable, the listing may not have been included in the approved location sync. You can check if the listing is a paid listing by looking on the right-hand side under "More Business Info" for "This business is a Yelp advertiser."

Yelp Knowledge

• Listings: Only supported for clients that purchase Yelp Knowledge through Yext.
• Reviews: 200 full-text reviews pulled through API with real-time updates. Review Response is available as an add-on.

Functionality Comparison

Business Eligibility

Yelp eligibility guidelines can be found in the Yelp documentation. If a business is deemed ineligible by Yelp, the business will have the status "Not Synced" with the following unavailable reason: "Yelp indicated that they were unable to verify your business…"

Eligible Businesses

• Local Businesses & Services
• Local Places
• Local Flavor
• Annual Events
• Opening Soon Businesses
• Pop-up shops (if local, have a physical location, provide some kind of service to people, and are customer-facing)

Ineligible Businesses

Most ineligible businesses fall into the following categories: lead generation companies, direct sales, online only, product vendors, short term events, B2B, and businesses without a local presence.

• ATMs
• B2B entities serving only corporate/government clients
• Corporate Offices
• E-commerce Products, Direct Sellers and/or Direct Sales
• Kiosks/Vending Machines
• Online Only or E-commerce Businesses
• Online Directories/Referral Services
• Spam
• Retail store departments & additional services

Cancellation of Yelp Services

If you cancel services with Yelp, Yext removes all photos and special hours that have been sent through Yext. Photos are removed because only the source of the photos has permission to remove them.

Supported Fields

The following Yext fields sync to Yelp:

All updates pushed to Yelp are subject to manual review by Yelp's team and some updates might get rejected. If you're seeing a field not update, make sure the content passes the Yelp data quality guidelines.

Name

Character length: The business name must be shorter than 64 characters.

Special characters: In most cases, the name shouldn't be in all CAPS and should be consistent across a chain. "&" and "-" are acceptable, but most other special symbols are not if they are not part of the name (%, $, #, /, !, etc.)

Business type: Yelp will generally remove "LLC," "INC," "LMTD," and "CO" from the business name, as this information is not useful to consumers — except for businesses that consistently include these business types in their names across platforms.

Practitioner/Professional listings: Formatting should be "First Last, Title." "Dr." should not precede the name. For example, "John Doe, MD" is correct, not "Dr John Doe." Titles (MD, DDS) follow the name without periods, divided by a comma. Examples:

• Doctors: Debbie P Moore, MD
• Lawyers: Debbie P Moore, JD
• Massage therapist: Debbie P Moore, LMT
• Accountant: Debbie P Moore, CPA

Realtors and Insurance Agencies are allowed to have their firm/agency in their name.

Address

The address must be less than 64 characters. Split address lines 1 and 2 into their respective fields, with suite numbers, unit numbers, etc. in the address 2 field. Yelp may standardize the street to the USPS abbreviation (Street → St, Road → Rd, Avenue → Ave, etc.). See the complete USPS list for more.

Phone

Yelp prefers to display local and untracked phones. The local/untracked phone is passed when both are populated. If only a tracked or toll-free phone is provided, it will be passed but might get rejected if it doesn't match the number on the business's primary website. The metered phone and the main phone are not the same — the metered phone is the tracking phone number on Yelp.

Website

The website must be all lowercase and less than 255 characters. Primary business websites are preferred. Social network links, menus, third-party directories, and third-party transactional sites (e.g., PayPal) will be rejected in most cases.

Tracking URLs: Yelp does not accept tracking URLs — e.g., a URL containing utm_source=local&utm_medium=yext&utm_content.

Display URLs: Yelp no longer accepts display URLs for any locations. If you are an enterprise client, this field can be updated by contacting your Yelp Account Manager directly.

Categories

Yelp only supports 3 categories. Categories can only be added when creating a new listing — Yext is unable to remove or update categories already displaying on an existing listing. If users would like to update categories on an existing listing, they will need to claim the Yelp listing and update directly in the Yelp UI.

Yelp may reject categories that do not pertain to the primary offerings of the business. More specific categories are preferred.

Photos

See the Photo and Video Guidelines for Publishers documentation.

Removing photos: The quickest and most effective way to remove a photo uploaded "from the business" is directly on Yelp. It takes longer for Yelp to take action through escalation with Yext — typically about 2-3 weeks to process. See Yelp's How do I remove a photo of my business? article.

Descriptions ("From The Business > Specialties")

For international locations, descriptions only display when viewing a listing on its local domain (e.g., a Finnish location on fi.yelp.fi, but not on www.yelp.com).

Descriptions will not update and will instead return an unavailable warning if they don't conform to Yelp's content standards. Business descriptions must follow these restrictions:

• Cannot be just a list of keywords
• Must be between 15 and 1500 characters
• Allowed characters: A-Z, 0-9, and !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;=?@[]^_`{|}~, and spaces
• Can have newlines but they cannot be consecutive
• Cannot contain phone numbers, email addresses, or websites/URLs
• Cannot have too many capital letters (>30%)
• Cannot have too many consecutive special characters
• Cannot have more than 6 asterisks (cannot be consecutive)
• Cannot have more than 1 exclamation mark
• Cannot contain "<" or ">"

CTA

Yext does not sync to the Yelp CTA field. Any updates to that field should be done via the client's Yelp CS rep.

Featured Message

Yelp does not display Featured Messages anywhere on their site.