I think Yelp do a pretty good job of avoiding this, simply for the fact that they don’t have a cushion of associated traffic: people use Gmaps for this because

I think Yelp do a pretty good job of avoiding this, simply for the fact that they don’t have a cushion of associated traffic: people use Gmaps for this because they use Gsearch or navigation, and if Gmaps isn’t great at filtering out spammy listings, well it’s plenty good at other things. But if Yelp get a reputation for poor business data quality, users wont want to use it for that and there’s not a lot else to get them to visit & keep monthly active user counts up & give sales impressive stats to quote to businesses when they call. Also without quality business listings how would sales know the number to call to pitch ad campaigns?? It’s a pity this approach doesn’t scale as wildly as search, Yelp shut down all the non-North American sales stuff in 2016 presumably because it wasn’t profitable.