[argonaut]

This sounds like a misleading / high-pressure sales call, but if you read into it carefully there's nothing that indicates to me anything illegal, scammy, or even anything that would back up the claim that Yelp penalizes businesses that don't advertise.

A charitable interpretation is that the salesperson is basically claiming there were 21,000 searches the business showed up in, where they could have been shown at the top if they advertised.

[judge2020]

There are many cases of yelp doing these actions (we obviously don't have the source code as hard proof):

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2018/01/09/yelp-accused-hiding-posi...

https://raymondfong.net/a-candid-yelp-advertising-review-is-...

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-filter-positive-rev...

[millzlane]

For my clients they basically said that if we didn't purchase and edit our page with them. That our competitors ad's would show on or page. (No mention that yelp basically puts them there.) So if we paid and setup our page they would cease to show our competitors? Nope, they would move to the bottom of the page where most visitors end up anyway.

[nosuchthing]

I've directly noticed Yelp penalizing a local restaurant down in their search results for a key term and when I asked them about it, they told a nearly identical story to what this Reddit poster describes.

They had paid for Yelp advertising, and after deciding to stop suddenly their search result priority dropped, bad reviews were prioritized in their profile, and good reviews started being removed.