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Business directory and crowdsourced review forum Yelp commissioned a survey by Material to review the reviews on its platform.
The survey of roughly 2,000 Americans found that respondents read a median of five reviews about a business to inform their spending decisions, and 77% are currently reading more online reviews than they ever had before.
A separate study by Yelp found that 90% of its users compare businesses before deciding which one to visit, contact, hire or buy from.
While restaurants are a key category on Yelp, Material found that more than one-half of respondents also research and consider online reviews for services that allow providers to access their home or vehicle, such as work and repairs around the house (57%) or for their car (55%).
Yelp said that 49% of respondents who believe they came across a fake review tend to read additional reviews to form their opinion of the business in question, while 34% ignore the suspicious review, 27% look for another business an 24% report the review to the hosting platform.
More than 218,600 reported reviews were removed by Yelp’s moderators in 2021, and the company said in a blog post Wednesday, “To help maintain safe and reliable online communities, it’s important to report content that may violate a platform’s policies. Yelp relies on both consumers and business owners to report reviews that they believe violate our policies, and all flagged content is evaluated by our moderators.”
Yelp said it also regularly investigates content posted to third-party sites in order to uncover deceptive review practices, including monitoring and infiltrating online groups where people may attempt to trade or pay for reviews, adding that its investigators made more than 1,000 reports to third-party sites in 2021 to warn them of nearly 950 suspicious groups, posts or individuals they found participating in deceptive review practices.
The Material survey found that 85% of respondents trust reviews with written text over those with only star ratings, with Yelp pointing out that it requires its ratings to be accompanied by actual review text.
Reviews not recommended by Yelp’s automated software based on signals including quality, reliability and user activity on Yelp are still visible via a link at the bottom of a business’ Yelp page, but they do not factor into that business’ overall star rating or review count.
Yelp said an upcoming study from Information Systems Research found that people trust review platforms more when non-recommended reviews filtered by their algorithms are displayed, as Yelp does, instead of when those reviews are removed altogether.
The company wrote in its blog post, “Online reviews are critical to people’s decision-making and discovery of great local businesses. This is one of many reasons why Yelp invests in extensive measures to surface the most useful and reliable reviews.”
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