Yelp Supported Fields | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

The following Yext fields will sync to Yelp:

All updates we push to Yelp are subject to manual review by Yelp’s team. As such, some of our updates might get rejected. If you’re seeing a field not update, please make sure the content passes the following Yelp rules.

Name

Character Length. The business name must be shorter than 64 characters for us to pass it to Yelp.

Special Characters. In most cases, it shouldn’t be in all CAPS and should be consistent across a chain. Also, although “&” and “-” are fine, most other special symbols are not if they are not part of the name (%, $, #, /, !, etc.)

Business Type. For the most part, Yelp will remove “LLC”, “INC”, “LMTD”, and “CO” from the business name, as this information is not useful to consumers. The exceptions are for businesses that really want these business types, and who consistently include those business types in the names across platforms.

Practitioner/Professional Listings. Formatting should be “First Last, Title”. Therefore, “Dr.” shouldn’t precede the name. For example, the expectation is “John Doe, MD”, not “Dr John Doe”. Titles (MD, DDS) follow the name without any periods and are divided by a comma.

Realtors/ Insurance Agencies are allowed to have their firm/agency in their name.

Variations on DDS, MD, PC etc, will be standardized to their abbreviated form. Examples of these title abbreviations are:

• Doctors: Debbie P Moore, MD
• Lawyers: Debbie P Moore, JD
• Massage therapist: Debbie P Moore, LMT
• Accountant: Debbie P Moore, CPA

Address

Similar to the Name field, the address must be less than 64 characters. Make sure to split up the address lines 1 and 2 into their respective fields, with Ste #’s, Unit #’s, etc. in the address 2 field.

In some cases, Yelp might standardize the street to the USPS abbreviation (Street -> St, Road -> Rd, Avenue -> Ave etc.). For more info, see this complete list from USPS.

Phone

Yelp prefers to display local and untracked phones, so we pass them the local/untracked phone when both are populated. If only a tracked or toll-free phone is provided, we’ll pass it, but it might get rejected. This is because it’ll be edited when the phone number we’re passing does not match the listed number on the business’s primary website, social media, etc.

The metered phone and the main phone are not the same. The metered phone is the tracking phone number on Yelp.

Website

The website must be all lowercase and less than 255 characters.

Primary business websites are preferred. Social network links, menus, third-party directories, and third-party transactional sites (e.g., PayPal) will be rejected in most cases.

Tracking URL

Yelp does not accept tracking URLs - e.g. a URL that contains utm_source=local&utm_medium=yext&utm_content.

Categories

Yelp only supports 3 categories. We’re only able to add categories when we create a new listing as we’re unable to remove/update categories that are already displaying on the listing (i.e., if we are matching to an already existing listing).

If users would like to update categories on an already existing listing, they will have to claim the Yelp listing and do so directly on Yelp’s UI.

Yelp may reject categories that do not pertain to the primary offerings of the business, and more specific categories are preferred

Descriptions (“From The Business -> Specialties”)

For international locations, descriptions only display when viewing a listing on it’s local domain. For example, if you view a Finnish location on fi.yelp.fi, the description will display, but it won’t on www.yelp.com.

Descriptions will not update for any of the following reasons and instead return an unavailable warning (“!” in Storm) saying the location doesn’t conform to Yelp’s content standards.

Business descriptions must follow these restrictions:

• Can’t be just a list of keywords
• Text must be be between 15 and 1500 characters
• Include allowed characters including A-Z, 0-9, and !“#$%&‘()*+,-./:;=?@[]^_`{|}~, and spaces
• Can have newlines but they can not be consecutive
• Can’t contain phone numbers
• Can’t contain email addresses
• Can’t contain websites or URLs
• Can’t have too many capital letters (>30%)
• Can’t have too many consecutive special characters
• Can’t have more than 6 asterisks
  • Asterisks cannot be consecutive
• Can’t have more than 1 exclamation mark
• Can’t contain “<” or “>”

CTA

We do not sync to the Yelp CTA field. Any updates to that field should be done via their Yelp CS rep.

Featured Message

Yelp does not display our featured messages anywhere on their site.