Yelp lets businesses list if they require proof of vaccination

Last year, Yelp added a COVID-19 section to its app to help businesses communicate to customers how they were operating through the early stages of the pandemic. With the delta variant complicating things, the company is introducing two new labels shops and restaurants can add to their listings.

Now, they can say if customers need proof of vaccination to enter their establishment and whether their staff is fully vaccinated. As a Yelp user, you’ll have the option to filter for shops and restaurants that include those labels. That said, they’re optional, and only the owner of the business can decide to add them.

As it has done in the past when introducing other labels, Yelp says it will “proactively” monitor the pages of businesses that add those attributes to their listing. The company’s content guidelines require that someone write a review of a business based on their first-hand experience of it. But that hasn’t stopped some people from using the platform to express how they feel about things like vaccines. 

In response, the company has placed alerts on pages from businesses that have attracted attention for their stance on how to best protect the health and safety of their employees and customers from the coronavirus. Since the start of 2021, Yelp has issued about 100 of those alerts, leading to the removal of approximately 4,500 reviews.