[8][10][11] Max Levchin, the co-founders' former colleague as founding chief technology officer of PayPal and founder of MRL Ventures, provided $1 million in Angel financing.

[12][8] MRL co-founder David Galbraith, who instigated the local services project based on user reviews, came up with the name "Yelp".

[13] Stoppelman explained that they decided on "Yelp" for the company's name because "it was short, memorable, easy to spell, and was familiar with 'the help' and 'yellow pages'".

[22] The first non-English Yelp site was introduced in France in 2010; users had the option to read and write content in French or English.

[36] In June 2015, Yelp published a study alleging Google was altering search results to benefit its own online services.

[59][60] In 2012/13, Yelp moved into its new corporate headquarters, occupying about 150,000 square feet on 12 floors of 140 New Montgomery (the former PacBell building) in San Francisco.

[61] The company was profitable for the first time in the second quarter of 2014,[59] as a result of increasing ad spending by business owners and possibly from changes in Google's local search algorithm.

[62] The algorithm dubbed Google Pigeon made authoritative local directory sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor more visible.

[75][76] Later that year Yelp began experimenting in San Francisco with consumer alerts that were added to pages about restaurants with poor hygiene scores in government inspections.

[77] Research conducted by the Boston Children's Hospital found that Yelp reviews with keywords associated with food poisoning correlates strongly with poor hygiene at the restaurant.

Researchers at Columbia University used data from Yelp to identify three previously unreported restaurant-related food poisoning outbreaks.

[78] On November 2, 2016, concurrent with its earnings report for Q3 2016, Yelp announced it would drastically scale back its operations outside North America and halt international expansion.

[86] Business closures and stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States caused a massive decline in searches on Yelp (down 64–83% from March to April, depending on category) and company revenues.

[87] In September 2021, Yelp announced that it was relocating its corporate headquarters to a smaller space at 350 Mission Street to be subleased from Salesforce.

The closure and downsizing of these offices are expected to result in approximately $27 million in annual cost savings for Yelp during the 2023–24 fiscal year.

[8] The site has pages devoted to individual locations, such as restaurants or schools, where Yelp users can submit a review of their products or services[93] using a one to five stars rating scale.

[103] In 2013, features to have food ordered and delivered were added to Yelp[104] as well as the ability to view hygiene inspection scores[105] and make appointments at spas.

[107][108] In March 2014, Yelp added features for ordering and scheduling manicures, flower deliveries, golf games, and legal consultations, among other things.

[106][65] Yelp started a 7–10% cash-back program at some US restaurants in 2016 through a partnership with Empyr, which links credit card purchases to online advertising.

[113] In June 2020, Yelp launched a COVID-19 section that enables businesses to update their health and safety measures as well as their service offering changes.

In some cases, Yelp users that had a bad experience have updated their reviews more favorably due to the business's efforts to resolve their complaints.

[16] The system has led to criticisms that business owners can bribe reviewers with free food or discounts to increase their rating.

[95] New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said Yelp has "the most aggressive" astroturfing filter out of the crowd-sourced websites it looked into.

[136] In April 2017, a Norfolk, Massachusetts, jury awarded a jewelry store over $34,000 after it determined that its competitor's employee had filed a false negative Yelp review that knowingly caused emotional distress.

[144] In December 2019, Yelp won a court case that challenged the company's explanation of how its review recommendation software worked.

The court ruling stated that "None of the evidence presented at the trial showed anything nefarious or duplicitous on the part of Yelp in connection with the assertions made in the Challenged Statements.

[95] In February 2010, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Yelp alleging it asked a Long Beach veterinary hospital to pay $300 a month for advertising services that included the suppression or deletion of disparaging customer reviews.

[156][157][158] In August 2013, Yelp launched a series of town hall style meetings in 22 major American cities in an effort to address concerns among local business owners.

The judge from an early ruling said that if the reviewers did not actually use the businesses' services, their communications would be false claims not protected by free speech laws.

[173] Also in 2014, a California state law was enacted that prohibits businesses from using "disparagement clauses" in their contracts or terms of use that allow them to sue or fine customers that write negatively about them online.