What Is Yelp Request a Quote?
Request a Quote is Yelp’s messaging flow that lets a customer describe a project and send it to a business — and, when they opt for multiple quotes, to several similar businesses at once — without making a call. From the pro’s side, each request is a message lead: Yelp measures how fast and how consistently the business answers, and displays both numbers publicly on its Yelp page. Yelp reports that 84% of users prefer Request a Quote over calling.
How Request a Quote works from the pro’s side
A customer taps “Request a Quote” on a business page, answers a few questions about the project, and hits send. The request lands in the business’s Yelp inbox with those details attached; when the customer opts to receive multiple quotes, similar nearby businesses can also see the job through Yelp’s Nearby Jobs feed. The pull toward messaging is strong — Yelp reports 84% of users prefer Request a Quote over calling — and the decision window is short: Yelp’s own study found 57% of users contact a business within a day of starting research, and 82% hire within a week. Sources for both are collected in our speed-to-lead statistics.
The metrics Yelp attaches to it
Every quote request feeds two public numbers on your page: response time (your median over the last 30 days, with the 6 PM–8 AM window excluded) and response rate (the share of new messages you answer — a polite decline counts). Speed also compounds into volume: Yelp reports about 4x more quote requests for businesses replying within a day, and customers are 2x more likely to respond to replies within an hour that address project details. Leave requests unanswered long enough — no reply within 7 days and nothing answered in 30 — and Yelp disables the Request a Quote button on your page.
Winning quote requests
The playbook is consistent: reply in minutes, reference the actual project, and end with one easy question — we keep 10 copy-paste templates for first replies, pricing questions, follow-ups, and declines. The customer’s clock runs faster than Yelp’s math: in LeadWinner’s analysis of 100,000+ US home-service leads, customers who write back after a first reply do so at a median of 11 minutes. A Yelp auto responder holds that pace automatically, answering each request in about 10 seconds with a reply built from the project details.
Frequently asked questions
Does a Yelp quote request go only to my business? Not always. When the customer opts in to receiving multiple quotes, similar businesses can see and respond to the job through the Nearby Jobs feed — one more reason the first specific answer tends to win.
Does declining a quote request hurt my metrics? No — the opposite. Any reply, including “sorry, we don’t service that area,” counts toward your response rate. Silence is what drags the numbers down.
How fast should I answer a quote request? Minutes. Yelp’s data says replies within an hour that address project details are 2x more likely to get a response, and our data puts the median customer write-back at 11 minutes.