Yelp for medical practices: listings, ads and review rules

A patient searching for a dentist, chiropractor, med spa or doctor may land on a Yelp page before they reach your website. That page shows reviews, photos and a star rating your practice did not write, and Yelp’s own rules for businesses differ from Google’s in one way that catches practices out: Yelp’s terms tell a business not to ask its customers for reviews at all.

This guide covers what Yelp’s Terms of Service, Business Terms, Content Guidelines and support pages say a business may and may not do, how Yelp’s Consumer Alerts work, what the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews adds, and why a reply to a Yelp review is a HIPAA question for a covered practice. For related topics, see our guides to replying to patient reviews, HIPAA and negative review replies and medical practice directory listings.

The short version

• Yelp’s Business Terms say a business will not solicit or ask for reviews from its customers. This is stricter than the FTC rule and stricter than Google.
• The same terms bar offering incentives of any kind, such as discounts, freebies, refunds, gift cards or contest entries, in exchange for posting reviews, or to prevent, remove or modify reviews.
• Yelp says it may place a Consumer Alert on a business page when it finds evidence of paid reviews, suspicious review activity or questionable legal threats against reviewers.
• Yelp’s terms say buying advertising from Yelp does not influence its Recommendation Software or let a business alter reviews or how they appear.
• The FTC’s rule at 16 CFR Part 465 bans fake reviews, reviews bought for a particular sentiment, undisclosed insider reviews and review suppression through groundless legal threats.
• 15 USC 45b voids form contract terms that stop a patient from posting an honest review, and makes offering such a contract unlawful.
• A public reply that confirms someone is a patient or discusses their care can be an impermissible disclosure under 45 CFR 164.502(a). OCR settled with a Dallas dental practice over replies on its Yelp review page.

Your Yelp page and your Business Account

Yelp lets consumers post content about a business whether or not the business takes part. The Business Terms say so directly: Yelp allows consumers to post content about your business, including photos, ratings and reviews. Claiming the page through a free Business Account is how a practice gets a voice on it. The Business Terms say that an account holder must have the authority to act for the business and must use the Business Site only as its authorized representative.

Two lines in the Business Terms shape how the account is used. First, the business will not use the Consumer Site for business-related activities, including flagging reviews or messaging reviewers. A practice manager’s personal Yelp profile is not the place to answer a review about the practice. Second, the business will not misrepresent its identity or affiliation to anyone in connection with Yelp.

The Content Guidelines add that promotional material belongs only in a Yelp advertising product used through a Business Account. A consumer profile seeded with special offers or keywords may be removed, and the account may be closed.

We recommend keeping the page’s facts in line with your website and other listings: name, address, phone, hours and the services you offer. Our guide to directory listings covers how to keep them consistent. Consistent listings also decide what voice assistants say about you; see our guide to voice search for medical practices.

Why Yelp says do not ask for reviews

Here Yelp parts ways with the advice practices hear elsewhere. In its Business Terms, a business represents that it will not, and will not authorize or induce any other party to, solicit or ask for reviews from its customers. The Content Guidelines repeat it in plain words: businesses should never ask customers to write reviews.

Yelp’s support page Don’t Ask for Reviews explains the reasoning and gives examples. It says asking may hurt a business’s Yelp rating, because Yelp’s software may not recommend reviews that seem to be prompted or encouraged by the business. It then lists what not to do:

• Do not ask anyone to review your business, whether customers, mailing list subscribers, friends or family.
• Your staff should never compete to collect reviews.
• Do not ask for reviews after requesting customer feedback in other places, such as surveys or contact forms.
• Do not offer freebies, discounts or payment in exchange for reviews, and do not offer incentives to remove reviews.

For a practice, that rules out a Yelp link in the post-visit text, a “Review us on Yelp” card at checkout, a staff contest for reviews and a satisfaction survey that sends happy patients to Yelp. The FTC rule, covered below, permits generalized requests for reviews. Yelp’s terms do not. A practice that asks on Google, where Google’s own policy allows it, should leave Yelp out of that request. Our guide to patient reviews and replies sets out the Google side.

Recommended reviews and what ads do not change

The Business Terms describe Yelp’s Recommendation Software as automated software that tries to showcase reliable and useful reviews while displaying other reviews less prominently. Yelp says in the same paragraph that this software may suppress legitimate reviews or fail to detect illegitimate ones.

The terms then say that any purchase of advertising or other paid features from Yelp does not and will not influence the Recommendation Software, or allow a business, directly or indirectly, to alter reviews or affect whether, where or how reviews appear. A practice deciding whether to advertise on Yelp should weigh the ad on its own merits and not as a way to change its reviews.

The Business Terms also bar a business from attempting to generate automated, fraudulent or otherwise invalid ad impressions, inquiries, conversions or clicks, and from paying or inducing anyone to post, hold back, change or remove reviews or otherwise get around the Recommendation Software or Yelp’s fraud detection systems.

Advertising on Yelp

Yelp sells ads through its Business Account. We did not find a published Yelp advertising policy page for health care as of November 1, 2026, so we do not describe one here. Read the advertising terms Yelp gives you before you sign, and keep a copy with the date.

Federal law applies to the ad whatever the platform. 15 USC 45(a)(1) declares unfair or deceptive acts or practices unlawful, and 15 USC 52 makes it unlawful to disseminate a false advertisement likely to induce the purchase of services or cosmetics. Your state’s healing arts advertising rules also apply. We recommend running the same claim review on a Yelp ad that you run on a Google ad: no outcome promises, prices that match what patients pay, and a landing page that says the same thing as the ad.

If the page a Yelp ad sends patients to carries a tracking pixel, read our guide to tracking pixels on practice websites before the campaign starts.

Consumer Alerts

Yelp’s Consumer Alerts page says an alert is a warning message displayed over the reviews of a business’s page when Yelp has detected abnormal activity or attempts to mislead users, and that Yelp investigates before placing one. The types it lists include:

• Compensated Activity Alert: shown when Yelp has evidence that someone offered cash or other incentives in exchange for a review. Yelp says this alert is published in the U.S. only.
• Suspicious Review Activity Alert: shown after an investigation of questionable activity, which Yelp says can include large numbers of reviews from a single IP address or reviews from users connected to a group that coordinates incentivized fake reviews.
• Questionable Legal Threats Alert: shown when Yelp has evidence that a business may be abusing the legal system to intimidate or silence a reviewer. Yelp says this alert is published in the U.S. only.
• Unusual Activity Alert: shown when a business becomes the subject of media attention and activity spikes. Yelp says it temporarily disables posting and removes the alert when activity returns to normal.

The Business Terms also say Yelp may publicly notify consumers through its Consumer Alerts about any attempt to enforce a non-disparagement or gag clause against a consumer. A practice that threatens a reviewer with a lawsuit may find the threat itself shown on its page.

What the FTC review rule adds

The FTC’s Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, applies whatever the platform. The sections a practice on Yelp should know:

• Fake reviews (465.2): a business may not write, create or sell a review that misrepresents that the reviewer exists, used the service, or had the experience described. Section 465.2(c) covers procuring such reviews from the business’s own officers, managers, employees or agents, or their immediate relatives, for posting on a third-party platform.
• Buying reviews for a sentiment (465.4): a business may not provide compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned on, reviews expressing a particular sentiment, positive or negative.
• Insider reviews (465.5): an officer or manager may not write a review of the business without a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the relationship, and may not solicit reviews from staff or relatives in ways that lead to undisclosed reviews.
• Review suppression (465.7): no one may use an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a knowingly or recklessly false public accusation to stop a review from being written or to get it removed.

Sections 465.2(d) and 465.5 carve out generalized solicitations to purchasers to post reviews about their experiences. That carve-out tells you what the FTC rule allows. It does not change Yelp’s terms, which ask businesses not to request reviews on Yelp at all.

Gag clauses in patient paperwork

A patient intake packet or online booking page can carry fine print about reviews. 15 USC 45b, the Consumer Review Fairness Act, makes a provision of a form contract void from the start if it prohibits or restricts an individual’s ability to post a review, imposes a penalty or fee for doing so, or transfers the individual’s intellectual property rights in review content (other than a non-exclusive license). Section 45b(c) makes it unlawful to offer a form contract containing such a provision, and section 45b(d) has the FTC enforce it as a rule violation. Our guide to review gag clauses in patient agreements walks through the Act clause by clause.

The statute keeps duties of confidentiality imposed by law, defamation claims, and a site owner’s right to remove content that contains another person’s personal information. It does not let a practice bar honest reviews. Yelp’s Business Terms add that a business may not attempt to enforce a gag clause against a consumer whether or not the clause is barred by law. We recommend reading your intake forms and online booking terms for any review restriction and having counsel remove it.

Replying to Yelp reviews without breaking HIPAA

Yelp’s Content Guidelines say businesses should message reviewers using their free Business Account, that a public response is also an option, and that neither should be used for personal attacks or to offer an incentive to change a review. Yelp asks business representatives to upload a clear photo of themselves.

For a covered practice, the reply is also a HIPAA question. Under 45 CFR 164.502(a), a covered entity may not use or disclose protected health information except as the Privacy Rule permits or requires. A reviewer saying they are your patient does not authorize you to confirm it or to discuss their care in public.

OCR’s enforcement record includes a case on Yelp itself. On October 2, 2019, HHS announced that Elite Dental Associates in Dallas agreed to pay 10,000 dollars and adopt a corrective action plan. The press release says OCR’s investigation found the practice had impermissibly disclosed the protected health information of multiple patients in response to patient reviews on its Yelp review page, and that it had no policy on disclosures of protected health information in its social media interactions. OCR has also settled with New Vision Dental in California (23,000 dollars, over disclosures in response to online reviews) and with Manasa Health Center in New Jersey (30,000 dollars, over a response to a patient’s negative online review). Our guide to HIPAA and negative review replies covers those cases and how to write a reply.

A reply that does not confirm the person is a patient, does not mention any visit, treatment or detail, and invites them to call the office is the safer shape. A direct message through the Business Account is still a disclosure if it contains patient information, so we recommend the same rule there: move the conversation to a phone call with the office.

Questions to ask before you work on your Yelp page

• Who holds the Business Account login, and is that person authorized to act for the practice?
• Does any text, email, card, sign or survey ask patients for a Yelp review?
• Does any staff incentive or contest count reviews?
• Do our intake forms or booking terms restrict reviews or claim rights in them?
• Who writes review replies, and do they know not to confirm patient status?
• If we advertise on Yelp, have we read and saved the ad terms, and does the landing page match the ad?
• Are the name, address, phone and hours on Yelp the same as on our website and other listings?

Use and avoid

• Use: a claimed Yelp page with accurate hours, address and services.
• Avoid: “Review us on Yelp” in post-visit texts, emails, cards or signs.
• Use: “Thank you for the feedback. Please call our office manager at [office number] so we can talk.”
• Avoid: “We reviewed your chart and you were seen on time.”
• Use: a Yelp ad that states only what the practice can stand behind.
• Avoid: a discount, gift card or entry offered for a review, or for changing one.
• Use: intake forms with no review restrictions.
• Avoid: a letter threatening suit over an honest negative review.

An illustration

This example is invented. [Practice name], a chiropractic clinic, sends a text after each visit that says “Loved your visit? Review us on Google or Yelp!” A patient, [patient name], leaves a two-star Yelp review saying they waited forty minutes. The front desk lead, wanting to help, replies from their personal Yelp profile that the patient arrived late for a back adjustment.

Three things went wrong. The text asks for Yelp reviews, which Yelp’s Business Terms bar. The reply came from a consumer profile, which the Business Terms say should not be used for business-related activity. And the reply confirmed the reviewer is a patient and named a treatment, which is the kind of disclosure OCR has settled cases over. The clinic changes the text to mention Google only, has the office manager reply through the Business Account with a short invitation to call, and adds a written review reply policy to its HIPAA training.

Checklist

• Claim the Yelp page through a Business Account held by an authorized person.
• Match name, address, phone, hours and services to your website.
• Remove Yelp from each review request, survey follow-up and sign.
• End any staff contest or incentive tied to reviews.
• Never offer anything of value for a review or for changing or removing one.
• Read intake and booking terms for review restrictions and remove them.
• Reply through the Business Account only, with no patient details.
• Write a review reply policy and train staff on it.
• Do not threaten reviewers with legal action without counsel’s review.
• Read and save Yelp’s ad terms before advertising, and review ad claims as you would on any platform.
• Check your state’s healing arts advertising rules.

How we help

We build websites, local and organic search, Google Ads and lead generation and an AI front desk for independent practices. For Yelp, that means listings that match your website, review request flows that leave Yelp out, reply templates that do not confirm patient status, and landing pages that match any ad you run there. Our tools are built with HIPAA in mind. We confirm in writing what a BAA covers before any patient information flows through a tool, and if it is not covered, we do not route patient information through it. We are not a healthcare provider and we do not give legal or medical advice. Read our guide to healthcare marketing rules for the wider picture.

Sources

• Yelp Terms of Service and Additional Terms for Business Accounts (effective January 1, 2026)
• Yelp Content Guidelines
• Yelp Support Center: Don’t Ask for Reviews
• Yelp Trust and Safety: Consumer Alerts
• 16 CFR Part 465: Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (sections 465.2, 465.4, 465.5 and 465.7)
• 15 USC 45b: Consumer review protection
• 15 USC 45: Unfair methods of competition unlawful; prevention by Commission
• 15 USC 52: Dissemination of false advertisements
• 45 CFR 164.502: Uses and disclosures of protected health information, general rules
• HHS: Dental Practice Pays to Settle Social Media Disclosures of Patients’ Protected Health Information (October 2, 2019)
• HHS OCR: New Vision Dental settlement
• HHS OCR: Manasa Health Center settlement

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