Please explain.

Yelp is accused of predatory practices on business owners including pushing them to sign up for a paid subscription to hide negative reviews on their Yelp page. Otherwise, you are vulnerable to their algorithm which hides/shows reviews that are often less than favorable. Yelp reviews are now overtaking business' own pages on Google searches leaving businesses with less option to control, let alone, curate their brand's messaging.

Is there any evidence of this actually happening?

My friends who own or help run local small businesses have told me it happened to them, so I believe my friends. Of course, it's not explicit extortion like "pay us $500 a month or else", so there's no hard evidence for anything. Instead, magically not too long after they refuse a cold-call sales pitch, they have a bunch of bad/fraudulent reviews surface to the top of their Yelp page and then get another sales call later on.

Numerous credible reports from business owners, and numerous denials from Yelp. I don't really know who to believe.

I would hardly call them credible reports. It's easy to see how business owners could draw false inferences when they receive a Yelp sales call and coincidentally get a negative review shortly after.

Honestly, I thought this was long since debunked. There is no physical evidence of Yelp sales execs extorting small businesses.

Simply put, no. No evidence other than hearsay. And this, after countless lawsuits.

They're not doing either. I worked there, on the systems in question.

This just is not true. I have worked with a number of companies that have tried to pay Yelp to unhide their legitimate, positive reviews and there was nothing Yelp would do about it, no matter what proof you offered of the transaction or customer relationship.

Their algorithm rules all, sales has zero say in it.

If you’re so inclined, you can look up your local Denny’s for proof of the opposite. They are a big time advertiser with pretty poor reviews on average.

In addition to other things mentioned in this threat, Yelp recently set up unsolicited GoFundMes for restaurants, and while their intent may not have been sinister, restaurant owners were NOT fond of the move: https://www.eater.com/2020/3/27/21196593/yelp-gofundme-autom...

The hiding of positive and negative reviews if you don't/do pay is hard to prove, but one thing incredibly shady thing that Yelp does and is proud of is:

They will prominently display ads containing positive reviews for competitors on a business's page unless that business pays Yelp.