Yelp’s New Black-Owned Businesses Registry is Coming

Yelp just announced that they are launching a new feature that will allow users to find and support Black-owned businesses.

In their press release they announced that business can opt-in and self-identify as a Black-owned business. They’re working quickly to release the new feature within the next two weeks.

Yelp Foundation also donated $500,000 to the Equal Justice Initiative and NAACP Legal Defense Fund — two organizations whose work is uplifting and empowering Black communities across the country.

Meanwhile, if you’re ready to dine now, here’s a robust list of 133 Black-owned restaurants and pop-ups in San Francisco and Oakland.

Over the coming weeks, we will launch a new free searchable attribute that will give businesses a way to identify themselves as Black-owned, and make it easy for users to find and support Black-owned businesses on Yelp. This attribute will be opt-in only as the decision to self-identify as Black-owned should rest solely with the business. 

We’ve been inspired by the outpouring of requests for this feature from users who want to support Black businesses. In fact, over the last week we saw a 25x increase in the frequency of searches for Black-owned businesses across categories on Yelp compared to the same time last year. We’ve also heard from businesses that they want a simple way to highlight that they’re Black-owned — in February, we sent out “Black-Owned” window decals for businesses to proudly display on their storefronts. As we work quickly to launch this new Black-owned business attribute within two weeks, our Community team is curating Collections of local Black-owned businesses across the country for our users to support in the meantime.