Is Yell worth it for a trade?

Read this first

We compete with Yell. Bear that in mind.

We build websites for trades at £100 a month and we run Google Ads. Yell sells websites, ads and marketing packages to trades. So we are a competitor, and you should read everything below with that in your back pocket.

Here is the thing though. Every page currently ranking for this question is written by a web design agency or a comparison site earning a referral, and not one of them says so. Several of them attack Yell using claims we can show are wrong. We would rather tell you our angle up front and then be straight, including where that means correcting Yell's critics and giving Yell credit.

Every figure on this page is either Yell's own published number or its own contract, checked on 25 July 2026. Where a number is somebody else's claim, we say so. Where we could not verify something, we have left it out rather than repeat it.

The product set

What Yell actually sells you.

"Being on Yell" covers about six different things at wildly different prices, and the first job on any sales call is working out which one you are being offered. This is the current shape of it, with the prices Yell advertises on its own site.

Prices as advertised on Yell's business site on 25 July 2026. They are all "from" figures with no published ceiling, Yell's terms allow a set-up fee on top, and the advertised price does not say whether VAT is included. There is also a third package tier, Activate, which appears in the contract but is not headlined on the pricing page.

What nobody else checked

What you own, and what you only rent.

This is where the internet gets it wrong in both directions. Yell's advertising terms and conditions are published on its own site and settle the question. Here is what they actually say, as at 25 July 2026.

• →Your domain is yours, and the critics are wrongThree of the pages ranking above this one tell trades that Yell keeps their domain name. Yell's website rules say the opposite: if it registers a domain for your Yell website, you own the rights to it. Registration is defined as Yell acting as your agent, on your behalf. That is the normal arrangement and it is not the thing to worry about.
• →The website is not yours to takeYour Yell website cannot be transferred by you to an alternative host without Yell's prior written agreement. That single sentence is the real lock-in, and it is the one nobody quotes.
• →The content Yell writes belongs to YellAll intellectual property in content Yell creates is exclusively owned by Yell and does not pass to you, including where it was developed from material or instructions you supplied. So the photos of your work and the words about your business, if Yell wrote them up, are Yell's.
• →You might keep the words. Only the wordsIf everything is paid up when you leave, Yell says it may grant you a perpetual right to use the written copy it created, meaning human-readable text. Note may, and note that this is the text and not the website. Yell also says it is not responsible for storing your content after termination, so keep your own copies.
• →Using your own domain costs you the mailboxesYell's rules say that if you point your own domain at a Yell website you lose the email and mailbox features, except on the Standard tier where a mailbox is a paid add-on. Worth knowing before you move an address your customers already use.

Put it together and the honest position is: you keep the domain, you may keep the words if Yell agrees, and you never get the website. That is a sharper problem than the myth it replaces, and it comes from Yell's own paperwork rather than anyone's opinion.

Read the guarantee

The Lead Guarantee, read properly.

Yell markets its Accelerate package on guaranteed leads, with money credited back if it misses. That sounds like the risk sits with Yell. The terms tell a more complicated story, and every point below is from the contract rather than from us.

• →A missed call counts as a leadA lead is defined to include a telephone call, message, form submission, missed call, website form fill or email. A phone that rang while you were up a ladder and never got answered still counts towards the number.
• →Yell decides what counts, using AIFrom 1 March 2026 the measure became Refined Leads, which strips out what Yell identifies as spam and non-leads at its sole discretion, with the use of AI where applicable. Yell's own tracking and reporting is determinative, and it gives no warranty about the quality of a lead or whether you convert it.
• →You get credit, not cashThe remedy is a pro-rata credit against your Yell account. Yell's own worked example: a guarantee of ten refined leads, seven delivered, so 30 percent of charges credited. Your monthly charges remain due and payable in full regardless of performance.
• →You wait a year to find outActivate and Amplify are only reviewed at the end of the twelve-month initial period. Accelerate is reviewed at months four, eight and twelve.
• →Leave early and it evaporatesTerminate during the initial period and the guarantee ceases to have effect, with no credit or refund regardless of how Yell performed. So the guarantee and the 80 percent early-exit charge interlock: the only way to claim it is to serve the full twelve months.
• →Upgrading resets the clockAdd an SEO bolt-on or move up a tier and a fresh twelve-month initial period starts, on both the package and the bolt-on. Upgrading or downgrading mid-term also cancels the existing guarantee outright, with no credit for performance up to that point.

None of that makes the guarantee worthless. It does mean the safety net only exists for a customer who stays the full year and accepts Yell's own count of what a lead was. That is a very different proposition from the one on the sales page, and it is worth knowing before you treat the guarantee as your reason to say yes. Yell is also straight about the wider point in its own recitals: it makes no representation or guarantee that an advert will generate any particular volume of calls, business or revenue.

Reviews

Are Yell reviews verified?

Not before they go up. Yell's own support documentation says reviews are usually published shortly after submission and are not pre-approved. A reviewer needs a Yell account with a validated email address and has to confirm the review is based on genuine first-hand experience, but there is no proof of purchase and nothing tying a review to a real transaction.

The checks are all after the fact: user reporting, automated systems and manual review, with a reported review typically investigated within seven business days. Yell can ask a reviewer for evidence afterwards and remove the review if it is not supported, and it offers businesses a request-a-review feature by email or text. So the answer for a trade is that a Yell review carries less weight than a verified one, in both directions. A bad review from someone who never hired you can go live before anyone checks.

You will also find plenty of pages quoting Yell's score on the big review platforms. We have deliberately not put a number here, because consumers rating a directory they searched and business owners rating a sales and billing experience sit on the same profile, which makes the average close to meaningless for your decision. Critics quote the one-star share, comparison sites quote the average, and neither tells you whether a listing will win you work. Judge it on the traffic figures and the contract instead.

About the scandal you just read about

Why we are not repeating the fraud story.

If you searched this question before landing here, you will have seen a page headlining a billion-pound corporate fraud. It is worth being straight about what that is. It refers to allegations made by former shareholders about the collapse of Yell's predecessor business in 2013, pursued through the courts by a shareholder group. They are allegations. We could find no reported conviction, judgment or judicial finding of fraud.

We are not repeating that framing, for two reasons. It is not established fact, and a page that cheap-shots a competitor should not be trusted on anything else either. And even if every word of it were proven, it concerns a corporate collapse thirteen years ago and tells you nothing whatsoever about whether a Yell listing will bring you work in 2026. Judge the product, not the share-price history. The traffic figures and the contract clauses above are far more useful to you.

The comparison

What the same money buys elsewhere.

Here is where every other page pivots into a sales pitch. We are going to do the comparison anyway, because you need it, but we are putting our own offer in the table under the same headings, including the bits that do not flatter us.

Read row four again, because it is the one we could have quietly left out. Our websites go offline too if you stop paying, and the build stays with us. Anyone who tells you their £100-a-month website becomes your property is not being straight with you. The difference is not that we hand you a website: it is that there is no twelve-month term, no 80 percent exit charge, your own number is the one on the site, and the leads and the customers are yours from the first day. Ownership attaches to your customers, not to the code.

The other honest option costs nothing at all. Claim your free Google Business Profile, get it filled in properly, and start collecting reviews on it. For a lot of trades that plus a website that actually converts is the whole job. If you want the reasoning on whether you need a website at all, we have written that up honestly, including the cases where the answer is no. And if you are weighing paid traffic, are Google Ads worth it covers when they pay and when they burn money. We will also tell you plainly that we do not sell SEO, which is the product Yell is offering you at £300 a month.

Straight answers

Questions trades actually ask.

Is Yell worth it for a trades business?

The free Yell.com profile is worth claiming, because it costs nothing and takes half an hour. The paid packages are a different question. Yell's advertised entry prices start at £249 a month for its Amplify package, on a twelve-month minimum term, and its own accounts show the average Yell customer paying about £1,841 a year. That is worth it only if you genuinely want one supplier handling your website, ads and reviews with one person to ring, and you are prepared to serve the full twelve months. If you are buying it to be found on Yell.com itself, the traffic numbers below are the problem.

How much does it cost to be on Yell?

A basic Yell.com business profile is free. For the paid products, Yell advertises Amplify from £249 a month, Accelerate from £699 a month and Local SEO from £300 a month, and its terms allow a set-up fee on top of those. It does not publish a ceiling, and it does not say at the point of price whether VAT is included, so the real number comes from a sales conversation. The most reliable guide is Yell's own reporting to its bondholders: average revenue per customer for the twelve months to 31 December 2025 was £1,841, roughly £153 a month, and Yell says new package customers sit materially above that average.

How does Yell make money?

Two ways, with very different economics, and Yell publishes both. Placement on Yell.com itself ran at a 99.7 percent product contribution margin in the nine months to December 2025, so a listing or advert on the directory is close to pure profit. Reselling other people's advertising, mainly Google and Bing ads, ran at 46.9 percent, because Yell has to buy the clicks. Its packages sat at 74.1 percent. That is worth knowing before a sales call, because it tells you which product the business needs to sell you.

Are Yell.com reviews verified?

Not before they appear. Yell's own support documentation says reviews are usually published shortly after submission and are not pre-approved. A reviewer needs a Yell account with a validated email address and has to confirm the review is based on genuine first-hand experience, but there is no proof of purchase and no invite-only mechanism tied to a real transaction. The checks happen afterwards, through a mix of user reporting, automated systems and manual review, and Yell says a reported review is typically investigated within seven business days. Yell may also ask a reviewer for evidence after the fact and remove the review if it is not supported.

Do I own the website Yell builds for me?

No, and this is the part worth reading twice. Yell's website rules say your Yell website cannot be transferred by you to another host without Yell's prior written agreement. Its terms also state that all intellectual property in content Yell creates belongs to Yell and does not pass to you, including where that content was developed from material or instructions you supplied. If everything is paid up when you cancel, Yell says it may grant you a perpetual right to use the written copy it produced, meaning the human-readable text only. Note the word may, and note that it covers the words, not the website.

Do I own my domain name if Yell registered it?

Yes. Several of the pages ranking above this one tell trades they will not own their domain, and Yell's current terms say the opposite: if Yell registers a domain name for your Yell website, you own the rights to that domain name. Yell defines domain registration as acting as your agent to register it on your behalf, which is the normal arrangement. So the domain is not the thing to worry about. The website itself, the content and the call tracking number are. One catch worth knowing: Yell's rules say using your own domain on a Yell website costs you the email and mailbox features, except on its Standard website tier where a mailbox is a paid add-on.

What happens to my phone number if I leave Yell?

If customers have been ringing a Yell call tracking number, you do not take it with you. Yell's call tracking rules say Yell keeps all rights in the tracking number including any goodwill, and is not required to transfer it to you or anyone else at any time. The same rules bar you from putting that number on your stationery, vehicles or other property, and let Yell withdraw it at any time for any reason or no reason, without notice. Advanced call tracking is bundled into all three of Yell's package tiers, so check which number is actually on your advert before it becomes the number your regulars know.

Is a Yell listing free?

Yes, there is a genuinely free tier. Yell's terms define a Free Business Profile as a free profile on Yell.com which may be upgraded to a paid prominence advert later. Free gets you a claimable profile you can edit, photos and contact details, and the ability to invite reviews. Yell also offers a free website scan and GDPR scan, and a free app. Claiming the free profile and declining the follow-up call is a perfectly sensible position, and it is what we would do in most trades' shoes.

What is Yell's Lead Guarantee actually worth?

Less than it sounds, and the detail is all in the terms. A lead is defined to include a missed call. From 1 March 2026 the measure became Refined Leads, which excludes what Yell identifies as spam or non-leads at its sole discretion using AI, and Yell's own tracking is determinative. If it misses the number, the remedy is a pro-rata credit to your Yell account rather than cash, and your monthly charges stay payable in full regardless of performance. The Activate and Amplify tiers are only reviewed at the end of the twelve-month term. And if you terminate during that term the guarantee ceases to have effect and you get no credit at all, which means the guarantee and the early-exit charge lock together: the only way to claim it is to serve the full twelve months.

Does anyone still use Yell.com to find a tradesman?

Fewer people every year, and Yell publishes the numbers itself. Average monthly visits to the Yell platform fell from 5.4 million in its 2024 financial year to 3.8 million in 2025, and to 3.2 million across the twelve months to December 2025. Revenue from the Yell platform fell 20.3 percent in 2025 and another 31.3 percent in the nine months to December 2025. Yell's own co-chief executives put the decline down to broader changes in search behaviour. Those are still real visits, so it is not nothing, but the direction of travel is the single most important fact for anyone buying a listing to be found on the directory.

Can I get out of my Yell contract?

Yes, but the route matters. After the twelve-month initial period you move to a rolling monthly term and can give notice, around fourteen days before the end of your monthly period. Inside the initial period you can still terminate, but Yell's terms make you pay 80 percent of the charges outstanding for that period, plus VAT. Cancelling the direct debit is not a shortcut: the terms say non-payment of an instalment is deemed to be you terminating the agreement, which triggers that same 80 percent charge rather than avoiding it. Our separate guide walks through the notice procedure step by step.

Is Yell going out of business?

There is no evidence of that, and it would be unfair to imply it. Yell's latest audited accounts carry an unqualified audit opinion and are prepared on a going-concern basis, with £12.6 million of adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, and holders of about 99 percent of its secured notes agreeing to extend maturity to 31 March 2031. It is a smaller business than it was, with 45,600 customers at the end of December 2025 against 53,000 nine months earlier, and it is carrying net liabilities from a debt-funded structure. Shrinking is not the same as failing. Judge the product on the traffic and the contract, not on rumours about the company.

Is Yell worth it if I am not technical and want someone else to handle it?

This is the strongest case for Yell, and it is a real one. You get one dashboard, one account manager and one monthly payment, from a company that employed around 851 people last year with 656 of them in marketing and sales, and that puts a freephone cancellation number in its own contract. If you have no interest in learning Google Ads, no appetite for managing separate suppliers, and you would rather pay more for one throat to grip, that has genuine value. Just go in knowing the twelve-month term, the 80 percent early-exit charge, and that the website and the tracking number stay with Yell.