Yelp's 2025 Trust & Safety Report Details Fight Against AI-Generated Reviews
Published 2026-03-02
Yelp released its 2025 Trust & Safety Report in late February 2026, disclosing that the company identified and filtered out nearly half a million suspected AI-generated reviews over the course of the year, according to a company statement distributed via Business Wire.
The report also described a 58% year-over-year increase in what Yelp calls Media Attention Alerts โ flags placed on business pages when a news story or viral social media post drives an abnormal spike in review activity, often unrelated to a customer's actual experience with the business. Yelp said it more than doubled user account closures during the year as part of a broader effort to combat emerging manipulation tactics, and that its User Operations team worked to prevent review extortion schemes targeting local businesses on both Yelp and other platforms.
The disclosures arrive as Yelp has been investing heavily in AI on the commercial side of its business as well; trade coverage of the contractor and home-services platform market has reported that Yelp spent roughly $270 million acquiring an AI-powered lead management company earlier in 2026, part of a broader shift among lead-generation platforms toward AI-assisted matching and proposal tools.
For business owners, the takeaway from the trust and safety data is twofold: platforms are actively policing fake and AI-generated reviews more aggressively than in prior years, and a sudden, unexplained spike in reviews โ positive or negative โ is increasingly likely to draw automated scrutiny rather than being taken at face value. Maintaining a steady, organic pace of review requests tied to real completed jobs or visits remains the safest long-term approach, a theme also covered in this site's small business reviews guide.