How Does Yellow Pages's Rating Actually Work?

That matters because YP is a legacy directory: many listings carry reviews that are years old, with no visible expiration, sitting alongside anything more recent. A handful of old reviews — good or bad — can still be doing most of the work in a rating that hasn’t moved in a long time simply because nothing new has been added since.

YP’s Terms of Service (Section 2.2, “User-Provided Content Guidelines”) set the Publication Standards every review has to meet. YP reserves the right — but not the obligation — to refuse to post or remove content that violates those standards, at its sole discretion. It does not publish a guaranteed review timeline for those decisions.

• A visible average of star ratings (1–5) across all reviews currently published on the business page — no disclosed weighting formula beyond that.
• No published recency weighting — an old review counts the same as one posted yesterday, which is why stale, low-volume profiles can sit unchanged for years.
• Compliance with YP’s Publication Standards — content that’s defamatory, vulgar, obscene, profane, impersonates someone, or otherwise violates the Terms of Use can be refused or removed, which keeps it out of the average entirely.
• Whether the listing is claimed — claiming doesn’t change the math, but it’s what unlocks the ability to post a public response next to a review, which is the main lever a business actually has.