Two ways to answer a Yelp review,
and two ways to regret it.
Yelp gives a practice two ways to answer: a public comment under the review, and a direct message only the reviewer sees. The first federal settlement over a dental review reply was about a Yelp page, and the practice that paid it was answering in public. Knowing which channel you are in, and what neither of them verifies, is what separates a safe reply from an expensive one.
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The two channels, and what each one actually is
Yelp documents both. The difference between them is the part practices get wrong, because the safer looking channel is the one with the sharper edge.
A public comment appears directly below the review and anybody looking at your Yelp page can read it.
It is the channel the 2019 dental settlement was about, and the one a stranger reads first. Write it for the next reader, not for the reviewer.
A direct message works like an email between you and the reviewer, and other Yelp users cannot see it.
Private on Yelp is not the same as verified. A Yelp handle is not proof of identity, so a message that discusses a chart is a message to somebody the practice has not confirmed is the patient.
Reviews Yelp's software does not recommend stay readable at the bottom of the page but do not count toward the star rating or the review count.
A one star review that is sitting in the not recommended section is already costing you less than it looks, which is worth checking before a practice spends a week on it.
No Yelp employee can override what the recommendation software decides. Yelp says that is deliberate, to avoid conflicts of interest.
There is nobody to call and no relationship to build. The only inputs a practice controls are the experience itself and the reply, which is why the reply is worth doing well.
The direct message is where practices slip
In October 2019 a Dallas practice paid ten thousand dollars to settle a complaint about its replies on its Yelp review page, which carried a patient's last name and details of her health condition. In December 2022 a California practice paid twenty three thousand after replies to online reviews disclosed patient names, treatment and insurance information. Both were about what was written, not about where it was written.
A message that reads as private and is not safe
Hi, I looked you up by the appointment date. The extraction was quoted at the consult and your carrier only covers one film a year, which is where the balance came from. Happy to send the ledger over.
A message that starts before the record does
Thanks for writing. I would like to look into this properly, and to do that I need to confirm who I am speaking with first. Could you call the office directly? Ask for the practice manager and we can go through it there.
The second message assumes nothing about who is on the other end of the handle. It moves the conversation to a channel where identity can be checked, which is the step the first message skipped and the reason it would have been a disclosure either way.
Sources
- Dental Practice Pays $10,000 to Settle Social Media Disclosures of Patients' Protected Health Information HHS Office for Civil Rights. Dated 2019-10-02. Read 2026-09-10.
- HHS Civil Rights Office Enters Settlement with Dental Practice Over Disclosures of Patients' Protected Health Information HHS Office for Civil Rights. Dated 2022-12-14. Read 2026-09-10.
The other places a practice gets reviewed
Yelp rarely arrives on its own. Whatever mix of listings your practice ended up with, the reviews land in one inbox here with a draft attached to each of them.
- Yelp
- TripAdvisor
- DoorDash
- Trustpilot
- Etsy
- Square
Yelp questions a practice manager actually has
Two of these have answers nobody enjoys.
Can we ask happy patients to leave us a Yelp review?
You can, but Yelp says its software treats a review it suspects was requested as a reason not to recommend that review, and a review it does not recommend does not count toward your rating. Read that as Yelp telling you where your effort is wasted: on Yelp specifically, the reply is the lever, not the ask.
A review names a treatment. Do we correct the details?
No. Correcting a detail is confirming the rest, and both federal settlements over dental review replies were about exactly that kind of detail: a name, a condition, a treatment, an insurer. The draft acknowledges that somebody had a bad experience and offers a call, which is the only accurate thing a practice can say in public about a person it cannot discuss.
Is a direct message safer than a public comment?
It is more private, which is not the same thing. Nothing in a Yelp handle establishes that the account belongs to the patient, so a direct message discussing care is a disclosure to somebody unverified. Use it to move the conversation to a phone call, and keep the care out of it until then.
Do you sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement?
Not today. It is the same answer on every page we publish for dental practices, and if a signed BAA is a requirement before a vendor holds patient contact details then we are not the right fit yet.
Can you post the Yelp reply for us?
No. We draft, you post. Every draft is handed over for you to send, and on a platform where the contents of a reply have already cost a practice a federal settlement, a tool that published for you would be taking a decision that has to stay with the practice.
For dental practices
A reply you can read before anyone else does
Drafted for the review in front of it, then left for you to send. We do not yet provide a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement.