Yelp is currently pursuing a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google that survived a motion to dismiss in 2025 and is still in its early stages, and over the past decade the company has also been sued by small business owners alleging extortion, by users and businesses in high-profile Section 230 defamation disputes, by investors in a securities fraud class action, and by a consumer over telemarketing calls. Most Yelp lawsuit filings brought against the company have been dismissed; the Google case is the one to watch.
The Antitrust Case Against Google
On August 28, 2024, Yelp sued Google in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, case number 3:24-cv-06101.1Law360. Yelp Inc. v. Google LLC The complaint alleges that Google violates Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing both local search and local search advertising, and that the same conduct violates California’s unfair competition law.2The Hollywood Reporter. Google Sued by Yelp in First Lawsuit After Antitrust Loss Yelp seeks unspecified damages and an injunction.
The suit landed weeks after U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled, in a separate Department of Justice case, that Google had illegally monopolized general search with roughly 89% market share. Yelp was among the first private plaintiffs to build on that ruling. Its complaint alleges that Google uses its search dominance to steer users to Google’s own local products by placing Google content and sponsored businesses above competitors regardless of quality. About 30% of clicks from Yelp’s search results, the complaint says, land on another Google property, and Google’s design produces a high volume of “zero-click” searches in which users never leave Google at all.
What Google Argued
Google moved to dismiss on several grounds. It argued that Yelp’s claims were time-barred because Google’s “universal search” feature dates to 2007, well outside the four-year statute of limitations.3Justia. Yelp Inc. v. Google LLC, Document 47 It called Yelp’s 90%-plus local search market share figure implausible, noting it was generated using Google’s own Gemini AI tool. And it argued that integrating its own local content into search results is supported by legitimate efficiency justifications, citing a 2012 FTC staff memo that reached a similar conclusion.
In later proceedings, Google’s counsel argued the company’s search position is “dwindling” in the face of competition from AI platforms including ChatGPT, and pushed back on Yelp’s effort to import Judge Mehta’s findings, calling the two suits “markedly different.”4Courthouse News Service. Yelp Argues Google’s Dominance in Search Market Continues, for Now
What the Court Has Ruled So Far
On April 22, 2025, U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen denied most of Google’s motion to dismiss. She found Yelp had adequately alleged a “dangerous probability” of monopoly power based on the 90%-plus local search share, and she rejected the statute-of-limitations argument, ruling it was “not yet clear” when Google crossed into monopoly territory. Yelp’s local search advertising claims also survived, resting on allegations that Google’s U.S. ad share exceeds 50% behind significant barriers to entry.5Courthouse News Service. Yelp’s Antitrust Case Against Google Over Search Results Will Proceed Some claims were trimmed, with leave to amend.6Law360. Yelp’s Antitrust Case Against Google Didn’t Come Too Late
Yelp then filed an amended complaint reformulating its tying claim: Google, it alleges, uses its monopoly in general search (the tying product) to force users to consume Google’s local search results (the tied product) through the “OneBox” feature that serves Google’s local content automatically at the top of the results page.7Justia. Yelp Inc. v. Google LLC, Document 58 On October 22, 2025, Judge van Keulen denied Google’s second motion to dismiss the tying claim, finding Yelp had sufficiently alleged “express coercion.” She also accepted that the DOJ case tolled the statute of limitations, letting Yelp reach conduct back to October 2016. Specific design changes the court treated as actionable “overt acts” include Google’s 2016–2017 “Possum” redesign (which cut local results from seven to three), a 2021 “mega-map” redesign, and the 2024 introduction of AI-generated overviews at the top of results.8Editor & Publisher. Yelp Can Proceed With Tying Claim in Antitrust Case Against Google
As of mid-2026, the case remains in its early stages. No trial date or discovery schedule has been set, and it is still assigned to Judge van Keulen.9CourtListener. Yelp Inc. v. Google LLC Docket
Small Business “Extortion” Suits
Small business owners have long accused Yelp of pressuring them into buying ads by suppressing positive reviews or surfacing negative ones. Courts have consistently rejected those claims.
The leading decision is Levitt v. Yelp!, decided by the Ninth Circuit on September 2, 2014. A class of business owners alleged Yelp manipulated reviews and even authored negative ones to force ad purchases. Writing for the panel, Judge Marsha Berzon held that even assuming the conduct occurred, it was not extortion: businesses had no pre-existing right to favorable reviews, so the alleged behavior was “hard bargaining.” The claim that Yelp itself wrote fake negative reviews was called “entirely speculative.”10Justia. Levitt v. Yelp! Inc.11CBS News. Yelp Continues to Battle Extortion Claims by Businesses
A California state case, Demetriades v. Yelp, ended the same way. After a 2019 bench trial, the court found Yelp lacked the “requisite intent to deceive” and that the evidence showed nothing “nefarious or duplicitous” in how its review filter operates.12Eric Goldman’s Blog (Technology & Marketing Law Blog). Yelp Finally Defeats a False Advertising Lawsuit Over Its Review Functionality
FOIA requests did show the FTC received more than 2,000 business-owner complaints about Yelp, most concerning sales calls that continued after requests to stop.13MarTech. FTC Discloses Small Business Complaints About Yelp Yelp says its algorithm filters suspected fake reviews and that ratings are not tied to advertising status.
Section 230 and Defamation Cases
Yelp has been at the center of some of the most consequential rulings interpreting Section 230, the federal statute that shields online platforms from liability for what users post.
Hassell v. Bird
The California Supreme Court’s July 2, 2018 ruling in Hassell v. Bird is a landmark for platform immunity. San Francisco attorney Dawn Hassell sued a former client, Ava Bird, over a negative Yelp review. Bird did not appear, and a trial court entered a default judgment ordering Bird and Yelp to remove the review. Hassell had deliberately not named Yelp as a defendant, trying to sidestep Section 230.
The California Supreme Court reversed. Compelling a platform to take down user content, the court held, treats it as the publisher of that content, which Section 230 forbids. The court rejected the argument that Yelp was Bird’s “agent” simply by hosting the review and warned that extending injunctions to immunized platforms “would be particularly conducive to stifling, skewing, or otherwise manipulating online discourse.”14Justia. Hassell v. Bird, S23596815Electronic Frontier Foundation. California Supreme Court Strengthens Section 230 Protections for Online Speech It was the first state high court to hold that Section 230 blocks removal orders directed at non-party platforms.
Kimzey v. Yelp
In Kimzey v. Yelp!, decided September 12, 2016, a locksmith owner argued Yelp’s star-rating system turned user reviews into Yelp’s own content, and that promoting reviews on Google made Yelp the author of defamatory material. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, calling the star system a “neutral tool” that aggregates voluntary user inputs and does “absolutely nothing to enhance the defamatory sting of the message.” Distributing user content to search engines, the court added, does not strip immunity: “proliferation and dissemination of content does not equal creation or development of content.”16Justia. Kimzey v. Yelp!, 837 F.3d 979
Businesses Suing the Reviewer
Because suits against Yelp itself over user content usually fail, some owners have sued reviewers directly. In 2024, Tampa restaurant owner Richard Hales sued Yelp reviewer Irene Eng for tortious interference over a negative review of his restaurant Hales Blackbrick, seeking more than $50,000. In February 2025, a Hillsborough County circuit judge dismissed the case, finding the review was directed at the general public rather than at any specific business relationship.17Rutgers Bloustein School. She Reviewed a Tampa Restaurant on Yelp. Then Came a Lawsuit Yelp placed a “Questionable Legal Threat” alert on the restaurant’s page. According to Yelp’s general counsel, the company posted 16 such alerts in 2024.
Securities Fraud Class Action
In the summer of 2014, Yelp investors filed a securities class action in San Francisco federal court, later consolidated as Curry v. Yelp Inc., Case No. 3:14-cv-03547. Shareholders alleged the stock had been inflated by false statements about review authenticity while extortion-like practices were ongoing. The class period ran from October 29, 2013 to April 3, 2014, and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, CFO Robert Krolik, and COO Geoffrey Donaker were named as individual defendants. Plaintiffs pointed to the FTC’s 2,000-plus complaints and to insider stock sales totaling more than $81.5 million.
The district court dismissed the complaint with prejudice in November 2015, finding plaintiffs had not adequately pleaded loss causation or scienter. The Ninth Circuit affirmed on November 21, 2017, holding that the disclosure of consumer complaints alone did not establish wrongdoing and that insider trading was not “dramatically out of line” with normal patterns. No settlement; the case ended in full dismissal.18U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Curry v. Yelp Inc., No. 16-15104
Telemarketing Class Action
On August 7, 2024, Leon Weingrad filed a proposed class action against Yelp in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Weingrad says he received at least eight unsolicited Yelp telemarketing calls over about two weeks in the summer of 2024, despite being on the National Do Not Call Registry for nearly three years, and that he had no prior relationship with Yelp and never consented to being called.19ClassAction.org. Yelp Illegally Placed Calls to Numbers on Do Not Call Registry, Class Action Alleges The proposed class would include anyone on the Do Not Call Registry who received more than one Yelp telemarketing call within any 12-month period in the four years before the filing. The suit seeks injunctive relief and statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per call for willful violations.20ClassAction.org. Weingrad v. Yelp Inc., Complaint
Reviewer Compensation Suit
In August 2014, former Yelp “Elite” reviewer Lily Jeung led a class action in the Central District of California claiming Yelp violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by not paying its volunteer reviewers. The theory: because Yelp sometimes paid “scouts” to write reviews in new markets, an employment relationship existed with unpaid reviewers too. Yelp called the suit “frivolous,” saying the “argument that voluntarily using a free service equates to an employment relationship is completely without merit.”21ClassAction.org. Reviews in the News: The Ins and Outs of the New Yelp Reviewers Lawsuit An earlier version had been dismissed in February 2014 before being refiled.