Yelp Shares Update To Its Lawsuit Against Google
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 23, 2025
Review site Yelp shared the latest updates from its case against Google, with the Northern District Court of California allowing Yelp's core claims to move forward in Yelp v. Google.
U.S. Judge Susan Van Keulen rejected Google’s attempt to dismiss the case, finding that Yelp had plausibly alleged Google’s monopoly power and exclusionary conduct within the statute of limitations period and partially denying Google’s motion.
“Today’s ruling marks an important step forward in Yelp’s case against Google," Yelp General Counsel Aaron Schur stated in an email to MediaPost.
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The ruling came down on Tuesday. "As we argued in our opposition to Google’s motion, and as the Court recognized, Google’s anticompetitive behavior deserves to be examined. We look forward to presenting our case and detailing the harmful consequences of Google’s abuse of its dominance in the local search and local search advertising markets at the expense of what’s best for consumers, innovation, and fair competition.”
Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp, in August 2024 accused Google of being the dominant “gatekeeper” in general search, with approximately 90% share of the market.
He pointed out even during that time that Google had been found to illegally maintain dominance
through exclusive multibillion-dollar arrangements with browser makers, device manufacturers, and cellular carriers. It had been allowed to control what consumers see and where they see it.
"This dominance has given Google tremendous power over adjacent markets, including local search and local search advertising," Stoppelman wrote at the time. And although the U.S. Department of
Justice had initiated a trial, Yelp held steady to pursue its own.
Yelp had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in federal court in San Francisco on August 28, 2024.
At the time, Yelp called Google "the largest gateway to the internet that abused its monopoly power in "general search to dominate the local search and local search advertising markets at the expense of consumers, competition, and innovation"
Separately, and nearly a year later, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in the search engine market.
This week Google's lawyers and the Department of Justice are trying to determine what penalties Mehta will levy against the Alphabet-owned company, which is scheduled to release earnings Thursday.
