On 15 November 1999, the album was certified 12× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for sales reaching 12 million copies in the US.

Since its release, various writers and music critics have cited Led Zeppelin II as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time.

The album was written on tour, during periods of a couple of hours in between concerts, a studio was booked and the recording process begun, necessarily resulting in spontaneity and urgency, which is reflected in the sound.

[7] Kramer was quoted as saying, "The famous Whole Lotta Love mix, where everything is going bananas, is a combination of Jimmy and myself just flying around on a small console twiddling every knob known to man.

Parts of the lyrics were taken directly from Willie Dixon's "You Need Love", which led to the group being sued for plagiarism, eventually settling out of court.

[18] A mainly instrumental version of the song was recorded by CCS and was used as the theme tune to the BBC TV show Top of the Pops, ensuring it was well known by virtually everyone in Britain.

"Whole Lotta Love" has since been critically praised as one of the definitive heavy metal tracks, though the group have never considered themselves to fit that specific style.

Moby Dick is in drop D tuning and features a variety of drums and percussive instruments played with bare hands as well as drumsticks.

It was a regular part of Led Zeppelin's live show, developing to include additional percussion and electronic drums.

Led Zeppelin's arrangement includes a faster middle section in addition to the straightforward blues structure of the original.

[23] The album sleeve design was from a poster by David Juniper, who was simply told by the band to come up with an interesting idea.

[25] Juniper's design was based on a photograph of the Jagdstaffel 11 Division of the German Air Force during World War I, the Flying Circus led by the Red Baron.

The blonde-haired woman is French actress Delphine Seyrig in her role as Marie-Madeleine in the film Mr. Freedom, a leftist anti-war satire by William Klein.

[15] By April 1970 it had registered three million American sales, whilst in Britain it enjoyed a 138-week residence on the LP chart, climbing to the top spot in February 1970.

The album helped establish Led Zeppelin as an international concert attraction, and for the next year, the group continued to tour relentlessly, initially performing in clubs and ballrooms, then in larger auditoriums and eventually stadiums as their popularity grew.

[30] In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau jokingly referred to the band as "the best of the wah-wah mannerist groups, so dirty they drool on demand", while complaining that "all the songs sound alike", before assigning the album a "B" grade.

[31] He nonetheless conceded in 1970 that "Led Zeppelin simply out-heavied everyone" the previous year, "pitting Jimmy Page's repeated low-register fuzz riffs against the untiring freak intensity of Robert Plant's vocal.

[13] While crediting the band for essentially inventing metal, Tom Hull said that, after the first album had declared their musical ambition, "the second honed it down to a singular entity, a sound", with subsequent albums expanding on it in "sophisticated, subtler, often quite intelligent" ways, but still indebted to "the basic dumbness" of II – "dumb not in the sense of stupid but of non-speaking.

[44] According to Robert Santelli's The Big Book of Blues: A Biographical Encyclopedia (2001), Led Zeppelin "had already begun to move beyond its blues-rock influences, venturing into previously unexplored hard-rock territories".

[13] Page's guitar solo in "Heartbreaker" was an influence on later renowned guitarists Eddie Van Halen, as inspiration for his two-handed tapping technique, and Steve Vai.

[47] In 1990, CD Review ranked it sixth on their list of top 50 CDs for starting a "pop/rock" library; an accompanying blurb described the album as "white boy blues with a hard rock edge".

[65] Pitchfork journalist Mark Richardson said, "the reissue sounds as thrilling as ever",[68] while Julian Marszalek of The Quietus noted the bonus disc's "intriguing insight" into the original record's creation.

"[70] "As a two-disc set", Consequence of Sound's Michael Madden wrote, "this reissue is both a reminder of the original album's wallop and a closer look at the alchemy of a band increasingly attuned to ideas of progression.

"[67] Raoul Hernandez from The Austin Chronicle was more critical of the bonus disc, finding it to be "the thinnest of extras" offered by the reissue program.