Free · for funeral homes
You can dislike Yelp and still need to claim the page
The resentment is earned, and we are not going to argue you out of it. But the Yelp page stopped being a website you can ignore and became a data feed you cannot: it is licensed into the assistants families now ask at midnight. Here is how to claim yours in about ten minutes, and the one review rule that is the exact opposite of Google’s.
Claiming it, start to finish
Find the page that already exists. Search your home’s name on yelp.com. Most funeral homes already have a page they never made — Yelp builds listings from public records and user submissions, so “we never signed up” and “we have a page” are both usually true.
Claim it. Yelp verifies you by an automated call or text to the phone number on the listing, so have someone at that line. Claiming is free; the upsell to advertising comes after, and declining it is a complete answer.
Fix the four things the machines read. Name, address, phone and hours, exactly as they appear on your own website. Then the category, and a current photo of the building — a family arriving at night is matching a picture to a door.
Leave the reviews alone. Do not ask families for Yelp reviews. Respond to the ones that arrive, briefly and without argument, and put your review energy into Google, where soliciting is explicitly allowed.
The rule most homes get backwards
The standard advice — ask every family, gently, for a review — is right on Google and wrong on Yelp. Both companies wrote their rule down themselves, and they are opposites.
On Yelp: do not ask
Yelp asks businesses not to solicit reviews at all, and its filter targets solicited ones — so asking a grateful family for a Yelp review can push their words into the “not recommended” drawer.
On Google: do ask
Google asks for the opposite: remind customers, share the link, print the QR code — never pay for reviews, never screen for happy customers first.
Why the page matters more than it used to
Yelp turned its review corpus into a wholesale data business. A family that “doesn’t use Yelp” can get Yelp anyway, re-voiced by whatever assistant they asked — so a wrong phone number on a page you never claimed travels further than it used to.
Yelp supplies business-page information to Apple Maps, which is the layer Siri answers local questions from.
In its 2025 results Yelp’s chief executive said the company had “recently signed an agreement with OpenAI,” alongside a growing data-licensing line.
Want to know what the assistants say about your home?
That is the part you cannot check yourself in ten minutes. We put a family’s question to ChatGPT and to Claude, read the pages and listings behind whatever they answer, and a person writes up what we find. It covers your listings and the signals that feed them — it is not a Yelp score, and we will not pretend it is. Free, no list, no drip.