A federal magistrate in San Jose ruled Tuesday that Yelp can rely on another judge’s finding that Google holds monopoly power in internet search, letting Yelp skip proving that point on its own in its private antitrust case against the search giant. U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Van Keulen agreed to recognize five pages of legal determinations from U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s 2024 ruling against Google, meaning a jury at Yelp’s trial will simply be told Google is a monopolist.
Yelp filed the suit in August 2024, and it is set for trial in September 2028. The case seeks an unspecified amount of monetary damages along with an injunction barring Google’s self-preferencing practices. Tuesday’s ruling, issued in a 25-page order, pushes Yelp closer to a courtroom fight that has been brewing since co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman first took his complaints to Capitol Hill.
What the Ruling Actually Does
The order grants Yelp partial summary judgment on the central finding of Mehta’s 2024 decision: that Google holds monopoly power in general search services. Issue preclusion, the legal doctrine at the heart of the ruling, bars a party from re-litigating an issue already decided in a prior case if the earlier decision was final and the cases involve the same controversy. “Yelp has met its burden to show that the GSS monopoly power issue at stake in this litigation is the same in substance as the [general search services] monopoly power issue decided in U.S. v. Google,” Van Keulen wrote in her 25-page ruling. Google had argued the two cases were not identical and that Mehta’s findings should not control. Van Keulen disagreed on both points.
The scope of Tuesday’s order is narrower than Yelp might have liked. Van Keulen agreed only to the specific findings Mehta made about Google’s monopoly power, not the broader conclusions about Google’s conduct in search. Her ruling recognizes that monopoly power only from the beginning of 2009 through Aug. 5, 2024, the date of Mehta’s liability decision. Any argument that Google’s monopoly power continued past that cutoff will need fresh evidence at trial. Yelp still has to prove that Google used its monopoly power to harm competition in local search and local search advertising, a market Mehta’s ruling did not directly address. That is the harder part of the case, the part Van Keulen’s order does not pre-resolve. It is also the part that goes to the heart of Yelp’s complaint, that Google buries links to Yelp and other review sites in favor of Google’s own properties like Maps.
We are pleased with the result, which precludes Google from re-litigating that it has long been a monopolist in general search. We look forward to continuing to present our case and showing how Google exploits its monopoly powers to harm consumers, competition, and innovation.
The statement came by email Tuesday, with Yelp’s spokesperson framing the ruling as a major step in a fight that began more than a decade before the lawsuit was filed. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The magistrate’s reasoning tracks Mehta’s 2024 ruling closely, down to the language about “general search services.” The decision covers the period from the beginning of 2009 through Aug. 5, 2024, the day Mehta issued his liability decision. Any conduct past that date remains open for jury argument. Trial in Yelp’s case is set for September 2028.
Yelp’s 15-Year War With Google
Yelp’s fight with Google is older than the lawsuit. The two companies’ relationship dates to 2007, when Yelp ended a licensing deal that had given Google access to ratings and review excerpts from Yelp. By 2010, according to a timeline Yelp published, Google was incorporating content scraped from competitors, including Yelp, without permission or attribution.
That September, Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, telling lawmakers that “to date, consumers cannot find links to Yelp in Google’s merged results, bel ying Google’s public pronouncements that ‘the competition is just one click away.'” His written testimony, posted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, framed Google’s dominance as a structural threat to any startup that depended on Google for traffic. At the time, 75% of Yelp’s traffic came from Google, according to contemporaneous reporting on the hearing. The European Union opened its own investigation of Google’s self-preferencing a few years later, fining Google €2.42 billion in June 2017 for illegally favoring its Google Shopping vertical in search results. The House Judiciary Committee issued a similar finding in October 2020. The Justice Department sued Google the same year.
Yelp returned to Washington in March 2020, telling the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust at a hearing focused specifically on self-preferencing. By then, Google’s search dominance had only deepened, and the company was facing antitrust scrutiny on multiple fronts. Yelp filed its own lawsuit on Aug. 28, 2024, the same month Mehta issued his liability finding. The complaint, filed in federal court in San Jose, targets Google’s “self-preferencing” of its own local results, with Maps and other Google properties crowding out Yelp in local search. It defines Yelp and similar sites as “specialized vertical providers,” or SVPs, platforms that include “structured data that is not available elsewhere and made possible only through sustained investment,” according to the complaint.
Google’s motion to dismiss the case failed in October 2025, when Van Keulen ruled in a 33-page order that Yelp had plausibly alleged Google’s monopoly power and the harm it caused. Yelp filed an amended complaint the following May, adding technical details and studies. The amended complaint survived Van Keulen’s review, and the case is now firmly in pre-trial litigation. The timeline of the next phase runs through the discovery period and into a trial set for September 2028.
- 2007: Yelp ends a licensing deal that had given Google access to its ratings and review excerpts.
- September 2011: Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, telling lawmakers Google buries Yelp links in its results.
- June 2017: The European Union fines Google €2.42 billion for self-preferencing its Google Shopping vertical in search results.
- October 2020: The House Judiciary Committee report finds Google misuses its dominance through self-preferencing; the Justice Department sues Google the same year.
- August 2024: U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta finds Google illegally maintained monopolies in general search and general search text advertising.
- Aug. 28, 2024: Yelp files its own antitrust suit against Google in federal court in San Jose.
- October 2025: U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Van Keulen denies Google’s motion to dismiss the Yelp case in a 33-page order.
- June 30, 2026: Van Keulen grants Yelp partial summary judgment, recognizing Mehta’s monopoly-power finding.
- September 2028: Trial set for Yelp v. Google.
The Mehta Case Yelp Is Riding
Yelp’s victory rests on a case it did not bring. The underlying government suit, U.S. v. Google, was filed in October 2020 during the final weeks of the first Trump administration. After a nine-week bench trial, Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google was a monopolist in two markets: general search services and general search text advertising. Mehta found that Google’s many agreements making it the default search engine on products like Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy phones had “given Google access to scale that its rivals cannot match.” Google has appealed the 2024 ruling, and that appeal is pending. Mehta followed up with a remedies decision in September 2025 that barred Google from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts for the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app.
The Yelp lawsuit piggybacks on Mehta’s ruling in a way Mehta himself set the stage for. A key part of Mehta’s 2024 opinion was to point out the primary differences between general search engines, like Google, and SVPs like Yelp, an analysis Van Keulen recognized as part of her partial summary judgment. Mehta’s ruling drew a line between the broad index of all web pages that Google returns and the structured, curated data that SVPs provide, like Yelp’s restaurant ratings or Tripadvisor’s hotel reviews. That distinction is the foundation for Yelp’s argument that local search is a separate market where Google uses its general search monopoly to favor its own properties. Yelp’s complaint identifies Google Maps, which carries its own ratings and reviews, as the chief example of self-preferencing in local search. The open question for Yelp’s jury is whether Google used that monopoly power to harm competition in that local market. Yelp will still need to prove that point with its own evidence at trial. Google’s pending appeal of Mehta’s 2024 ruling adds a layer of uncertainty that hangs over the whole case.
| U.S. v. Google | Yelp v. Google | |
|---|---|---|
| Plaintiff | U.S. Department of Justice | Yelp Inc. |
| Filed | October 2020 | Aug. 28, 2024 |
| Court | U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia | U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California |
| Judge | U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta | U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Van Keulen |
| Core finding | Google is a monopolist in general search services and general search text advertising | Google’s monopoly power from 2009 to Aug. 5, 2024 recognized via partial summary judgment |
| Trial | Nine-week bench trial concluded August 2024 | Jury trial set for September 2028 |
| Relief sought | Behavioral remedies, no Chrome/Android divestiture | Unspecified monetary damages plus injunction |
| Status | Liability and remedies decisions under appeal to D.C. Circuit | Partial summary judgment granted June 30, 2026 |
The Local Search Question That Survives
The case that survives Van Keulen’s order is local search, not general search. Yelp will have to prove at trial that Google has used its monopoly power to harm competition in local search and local search advertising, the markets where someone looks for a restaurant, a plumber, or a bicycle repair shop. The complaint argues Google favors its own properties, particularly Google Maps, which carries its own ratings and reviews, while burying links to Yelp and similar sites in search results. Van Keulen’s ruling recognizes Google’s monopoly power in general search but explicitly leaves the question of how that power plays out in local search to a jury. Trial is set for September 2028.
The numbers behind the case underline what Yelp says is at stake. At the time of Stoppelman’s 2011 testimony, 75% of Yelp’s traffic came from Google. Yelp’s complaint frames SVPs as platforms built on “structured data that is not available elsewhere and made possible only through sustained investment.” The complaint accuses Google of degrading the quality of local search results to grow its own market power and divert traffic away from competitors. Yelp is asking for both an injunction barring future self-preferencing and an unspecified amount of monetary damages for past harm. Yelp’s amended complaint, filed in May 2025, added technical details and studies to support those claims.
Google’s November 2024 motion to dismiss argued that Yelp is a specialized vertical provider responding to user queries with proprietary data. The magistrate’s Tuesday decision does not address Google’s substantive defenses, which remain to be argued at trial. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s ruling. Google’s broader antitrust exposure goes well beyond Yelp’s suit. A separate federal court in Virginia ruled in May 2025 that Google had illegally monopolized ad tech markets. The European Union has opened its own investigation of Google’s self-preferencing under the Digital Markets Act. The Turkish Competition Board fined Google in April 2021 for self-preferencing hotel and local content.
Yelp’s case progressed to partial summary judgment on the back of Mehta’s 2024 liability decision. The magistrate’s Tuesday order came after Van Keulen’s prior rulings in the case had cleared the way for the narrow issue preclusion argument. The September 2028 trial date sets a clock on the rest of the discovery and motions practice. The remaining dispute is whether Google’s general search monopoly has spilled into local search and local search advertising. Google’s appeal of Mehta’s 2024 ruling to the D.C. Circuit adds another variable: if that appeal succeeds, the foundation Van Keulen relied on could shift. Yelp’s case will proceed in the meantime.
A Win With Two Asterisks
Yelp’s procedural win comes with two asterisks that will define the next two years of the case. The first is Google’s appeal of Mehta’s 2024 ruling at the D.C. Circuit, which targets the very finding Van Keulen recognized as binding. The status of that appeal will determine whether the foundation Van Keulen relied on stays in place. The second is the substance Yelp still has to prove at trial, that Google’s monopoly in general search has spilled over into local search and local search advertising in ways that harm Yelp specifically. The September 2028 trial is more than two years away. Discovery in the case will cover the period from 2009 onward, the years in which Yelp says Google built and maintained its self-preferencing. Both sides will spend that time focused on the local search question the magistrate’s order explicitly left to the jury.
The stakes for Yelp are existential as well as financial. Yelp’s complaint accuses Google of “degrad[ing] local search quality and demot[ing] rivals to grow its market power,” language drawn from the company’s own public description of the suit. The case seeks both a forward-looking injunction and monetary damages for the years of conduct Yelp says has drained its traffic and advertising revenue. If Yelp wins on the merits at trial, the injunction could reshape how Google displays local results in its search engine. That is the part of the case Mehta did not decide for Yelp and that no partial summary judgment order can decide in advance.
The ruling also lands at a moment of multiple overlapping Google antitrust actions. The DOJ’s case against Google over online search is in appellate limbo at the D.C. Circuit, where Mehta later ruled in September 2025 that Google did not have to divest Chrome or Android but was barred from certain exclusive contracts, a decision covered in the Google breakup fight that AI reshaped. Apple shares climbed more than three percent in after-hours trading the same day on news that Google could keep paying to preload its search engine on iPhones, in a stock move that reflected the Mehta remedies decision. Yelp’s case is one of several private actions now testing whether courts will order structural or behavioral changes to Google’s search business. A federal court in Virginia ruled in May 2025 that Google had illegally monopolized ad tech markets, expanding the company’s antitrust exposure beyond search. The European Union’s parallel investigation into Google’s self-preferencing under the Digital Markets Act adds another front in the multi-jurisdictional pressure on the company’s search business.
