Yelp sues Google over dominance in local search

Ben Schoon | Aug 29 2024 - 8:35 am PT

Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Google over the company’s dominance in local search results, calling it the “largest information gatekeeper in existence.”

In a blog post, Yelp details its reasoning for filing a lawsuit against Google. The company, known for years now for its local search and reviews of local businesses, says it is fighting “to make Google’s local search experience more helpful for consumers and create a level playing field for competing vertical search services.”

Yelp has long fought to make Google’s local search experience more helpful for consumers and create a level playing field for competing vertical search services. With our action, we aim to safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages, and prevent Google from engaging in anticompetitive practices so that innovation may flourish.

Yelp adds on a website dedicated to the lawsuit that Google’s “illegal self-preferencing in the local search market has significantly harmed consumers and stifled innovation.”

Google has made significant efforts both in Maps and Search to handle local search needs, which do tend to appear before traditional search results. These may include phone numbers, user-generated reviews, pictures, and other needed information. Yelp’s website similarly aims to gather together this information for users.

Yelp, however, claims that Google has “degraded local search quality” saying that Google “knows that it won’t win on the merits of quality in local search.” Yelp doesn’t offer much to explain how Google’s local search quality is worse besides referencing that a considerable portion of reviews on Google are “consisting of only star ratings with no text” which Yelp says is “less helpful” and blocks on its own platform.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says that Google’s defeat in a major US antitrust lawsuit led to the decision to “finally” sue Google as expressed in an interview with The New York Times.

Google, speaking to The Verge about the case, referenced a previous legal decision where the FTC threw out similar claims by Yelp in 2013 as well as in the very antitrust lawsuit that led to Yelp’s latest legal effort. A Google spokesperson explains:

Yelp’s claims are not new. Similar claims were thrown out years ago by the FTC, and recently by the judge in the DOJ’s case. On the other aspects of the decision to which Yelp refers, we are appealing. Google will vigorously defend against Yelp’s meritless claims.

Notably too, Yelp’s lawsuit references Google’s AI search results for quotes about Google’s dominance in local search.