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This summer, a Baskin-Robbins in Santa Ana, California, put up a sign in its shop to entice customers to leave glowing reviews.
“Give us a 5-star review on Yelp & get a free kids scoop!!!,” it said. “Show us the review. :)”
While some people may have taken them up and received a cold treat, it also got the business in hot water with Yelp. The platform prohibits what it calls a “compensated activity.” And after a user sent a photo of the sign, Yelp slapped a pop-up window on the shop’s Yelp page.
“We caught someone offering up payment in the form of cash, discounts, gift certificates, or other incentives in exchange for someone to write, change, prevent, or remove reviews for this business,” Yelp warns in the pop-up window. “We wanted you to know because these actions not only hurt consumers, but also honest businesses who play by the rules.”
One of the pop-up windows Yelp is putting on business pages when it has evidence that its reviews aren’t genuine. Yelp
In a recent post on Yelp’s blog, Noorie Malik, VP of user operations, announced the platform was now publishing an index of alerts about “compensated activity” and “suspicious review activity” on its site.
- The post defines compensated activity as “someone offering payment in the form of cash, discounts, gift certificates or other incentives in exchange for writing, changing, preventing or removing reviews.”
- Suspicious review activity, the post continues, is when “we’ve detected a large number of positive reviews coming from a single IP address, or reviews from users who may be connected to a group that coordinates incentivized reviews.”
Pay per review: While consolidating the list of businesses is a new tactic by Yelp, it has been flagging businesses for violating review policies since 2012, issuing more than 4,900 of the alerts on US companies.
It’s no wonder Yelp wants to restore confidence in the reliability of its reviews.
- A 2013 study found that 20% of Yelp reviews were fake.
- Yelp removed more than 700,000 reviews for violating its policy in 2022.
Yelp and Material’s August survey suggests that the corrective action the review site is taking could have real consequences on the flagged businesses.
- 68% of respondents said they’d “no longer visit a business if they learned a business received incentivized reviews.”
Yelp also frowns on companies that send what it calls “questionable legal threats” to customers who left bad reviews..
Since 2016, it has been flagging companies when it has evidence that they’ve sent legal threats after receiving negative reviews.
“Consumers have the right to share their opinions about their experiences with businesses,” Yelp explained in a blog post at the time, “but there will always be a small handful of businesses who mistakenly think it’s a good idea to threaten consumers who exercise their free speech rights.”