Yelp Request-a-Quote, Explained

What Request-a-Quote Actually Is

Request-a-Quote is the form on your Yelp business page that lets a consumer ask for pricing or availability without picking up the phone. They pick a service category, answer a few Yelp-generated questions specific to that category (for example, "what's leaking" for a plumber, "how many rooms" for a painter), and submit.

From your side, it shows up as a lead in your Yelp inbox and, if you have notifications on, as an email and a push alert. You don't pay anything for the lead landing in your inbox. The cost only shows up if and when you respond to it — that's the part a lot of new Yelp advertisers don't realize until the first bill.

How a Lead Reaches You, Step by Step

The consumer fills out the Request-a-Quote form on your profile (or on a competitor's profile if Yelp routes the request to multiple businesses in the category, which it often does). Yelp packages the answers into a lead card: service type, the specific details the consumer entered, and sometimes a phone number if they chose to share one.

That lead lands in your Yelp for Business inbox. You get notified through whatever channels you've enabled — email is the default, the mobile app push is common, and some businesses also route it through Zapier or a similar integration to a CRM or phone.

At that point you have three options: reply, decline, or do nothing. Only replying triggers the response fee. A lot of the practical work in running Yelp ads well is deciding, lead by lead, which of those three is the right call.

Is There a Reply Window?

Yelp does not publish a hard deadline you have to hit before a lead expires or the fee changes. What Yelp does do is track your average response time and show it on your public profile as a badge ("usually responds in under an hour," for instance). Consumers see that badge before they even submit a request, and it factors into whether they pick you over another business Yelp routed the same lead to.

So there's no clock forcing your hand, but there's a competitive one. A lead sitting unanswered for six hours is often already talking to whichever business replied in ten minutes. This is one of the reasons response speed gets treated as a factor of its own, separate from response quality — you need both.

What Yelp's Policies Actually Require in a Reply

Yelp's guidelines for Request-a-Quote responses are fairly specific: your reply has to directly address what the consumer actually asked. If they asked about a leaking water heater, the reply needs to talk about the leaking water heater — not a generic "thanks for reaching out, call us for a free estimate" template with no reference to their situation.

Yelp also prohibits bait-and-switch responses — quoting one thing to get the reply sent and then upselling or substituting a different service once the consumer engages. The intent behind the policy is straightforward: Yelp is charging the consumer's trust as much as it's charging you a fee, and a reply that doesn't answer the actual question undermines both.

This matters for your money, not just your reputation. A vague or off-target reply is a response fee spent with a lower chance of converting, since the consumer often just moves on to a business that answered the specific question.

One compliance note worth flagging here: even when a lead includes the consumer's phone number, texting or calling that number directly without consent runs into TCPA territory. This isn't legal advice — consult an attorney for your specific situation — but the safe, common pattern is replying through Yelp's own thread, or only using a shared phone number for a human callback rather than automated outreach.

Why Some Leads Aren't Worth the Response Fee

Not every Request-a-Quote submission is a real job. Some are outside your service area, some describe work you don't do, some are clearly comparison-shopping with no urgency, and some are close to spam. Yelp doesn't pre-filter these for you — the response fee applies the same whether the lead was a great fit or a waste of five minutes.

That's the core economic problem with Request-a-Quote: you're charged for the act of replying, so the businesses that do best are the ones that get good at telling real leads from junk before they hit reply. Most businesses do this manually, reading each lead and making a judgment call. Yelp Lead AI does the same read with AI (xAI Grok) and drafts the reply for the ones worth answering, so the response-fee spend tracks actual job potential instead of every notification that comes in. It's a practical fix for the qualification step, not a replacement for understanding how Request-a-Quote works in the first place.