Is it better to leave reviews on Google or Yelp?

A Google review is attached to the business's Google profile, so it appears in the panel shown when someone searches for the business and on its listing in Google Maps, where the rating also sits beside the business in nearby searches. That is the widest audience a review can have.

A Yelp review is read on Yelp — on the business's own page, and in Yelp's own search results when someone looks for a category such as plumbers or brunch. The audience is smaller than Google's, and it is concentrated in the categories Yelp is built around: restaurants and local services.

Yelp runs every review through automated recommendation software. By Yelp's own figures about three quarters of reviews are recommended; the rest stay readable behind a link at the bottom of the business page, but they do not count toward its star rating or its review count. The software favours reviewers it knows something about, so a genuine review from someone who has never written on Yelp before can land in the second group.

Google filters too — it removes reviews it judges to be fake or against its policies — but it keeps no visible second tier. A review Google accepts counts, and one it removes is simply gone. On Yelp you can see the filtering, because the reviews it leaves out are a click away; on Google you cannot, which makes a Google rating easier to read at a glance and harder to audit.

Neither rating is proof on its own, and the useful signals are the same on both. Read the lowest reviews as well as the highest, check how recent they are, and look at how the business replies — a calm answer to a complaint says more than a wall of five-star praise.

Each platform is hard to game in a different way. Yelp's filter discounts reviews from accounts it knows little about — the easiest kind to fake — at the cost of sometimes hiding a genuine first review. Where a business has many Google reviews, any single fake one moves the average very little. A strong rating on both, from two different sets of people, is the most reassuring sign available.

The two platforms disagree about whether a business may ask. Google allows it, as long as the business offers nothing in return and does not pick out the customers it expects to be happy. Yelp asks businesses not to ask anyone at all, and its software may not recommend a review it suspects was requested.

That decides what a business can do about each. A Google rating can be built actively, by asking every customer. A Yelp rating can only be earned: be easy to find on Yelp, and let the people who want to write about you do it unprompted.

For a business the question is not either-or. Your customers chose where to write, and their reviews cannot be moved from one platform to the other — neither Google nor Yelp imports reviews from anywhere else. What you control is your own website, and there the stronger move is to show both.

Keep them as two visibly separate blocks, each with its own platform's rating and each review linked back to where it was written. Do not merge them into one averaged score, which no platform publishes and nobody can check, and do not mark them up as review structured data on your own page — Google treats review markup a business adds about itself as self-serving.