Yelp restaurant hygiene ratings will start rolling out Tuesday and continue over the next several months to eventually include health inspection reports for more than 750,000 metropolitan restaurants.
The initial rollout will cover 350,000 restaurants in New York, California, Texas, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., which make up about 40 percent of U.S. listings, according to CNN.
Restaurant health inspections aren’t secret, CNN reported, but it can be hard to find them deep on a municipal government website or taped to an out-of-the-way restaurant wall. As part of its effort to include hygiene listings on its site, Yelp created an open data system in partnership with city governments to centralize and standardize the data. For those cities that didn’t participate or didn’t provide complete data, the startup HDScores helped fill in the gaps with its inspection data from nearly 1.2 million U.S. restaurants in 42 states, according to Forbes.
Yelp has posted some limited hygiene information since 2013 in a few markets, but this will be the first time consumers can find data on so many restaurants in so many locations, Forbes reported. The information is expected to impact restaurants more because it is more easily accessible than current reporting methods.
According to comScore data from Yelp in June, the “internet property” was the 25th-most visited in the U.S. when both desktop and mobile devices are included, Forbes reported. In the regional/local category, it was first.
In San Francisco, a Harvard Business School study done in collaboration with Yelp showed that restaurants with poor hygiene scores were chosen 12 percent less often than those with high scores, according to Forbes.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.