Yellow Pages Business Listing: Free Claim vs Paid Ads

A Yellow Pages business listing on yellowpages.com is free for business owners, according to Thryv, the company that says it acquired the Yellow Pages in 2017: you enter your business location, name and address, claim your business with a free account, fill in your details and publish. Our take: “Yellow Pages” is a brand name, not one directory. The US listing is a free claim you can finish yourself, the paid products around it are advertising and marketing add-ons rather than the listing, and the same name is used by 20+ separate directories in other countries, each of which holds its own copy of your business and needs its own listing. This guide covers the free claim, what costs money, how to edit and remove a listing, the phone scam to watch for, and what we have seen when building on the Yellow Pages sites outside the US.

One note on sources before the steps. When we researched this guide, the yellowpages.com security layer blocked our requests, so we could not click through the live claim form. The steps below come from Thryv’s own Yellow Pages page, read in October 2026, and where that page is silent (verification, removal) we say so instead of guessing.

A free Yellow Pages business listing vs paid products

The free listing and the paid products are different things that share a website, and mixing them up is where most of the confusion starts.

	Free listing	Paid products
What it is	Your business name, address, contact details, services and service area in the yellowpages.com directory	Advertising and marketing add-ons sold by Thryv around the directory
Cost	Free, per Thryv’s own Yellow Pages page	A fee. Thryv’s page names Search Boosts, Ads Boosts, a Growth Package, website products and others, without prices on that page
Who needs it	Any business that wants to be found and wants its details to be correct	A business that has decided to buy advertising and has budgeted for it
What it does for your data	Gives you an account where you can change and publish your details	Adds reach (for example, Thryv describes the Growth Package as extending your online presence to five additional cities)

Thryv’s Yellow Pages page also says that free plans have limited functionality and that upgraded plans are available for a fee. Separately, Thryv’s general pricing page lists a Starter software plan at $99 per month (with annual billing offered at a discount) that includes posting to 60+ listing directories, at the time of writing (October 2026). That is a subscription to Thryv’s marketing software, not the price of a Yellow Pages listing, so do not read it as a cost of being listed.

If you want a deeper comparison of what free listings are worth before you spend anything, see our guide to free business listing sites.

How to claim or add a Yellow Pages business listing

Yellow Pages is an old directory brand, so your business may already be in it under your name or an old one. Search before you create anything. Thryv’s claim flow has four steps:

1. Enter your business location, name and address. Thryv does not say what the form does when no match appears, and we could not open the live form to see.
2. Claim your business and create your free account. You need the account to change anything later.
3. Fill in your details. Thryv names contact information, the services you offer and the area you serve.
4. Publish your updates. That is what makes the changes show in the directory.

Thryv’s Yellow Pages page walks through that sequence, and the starting point on the site itself should be the Yellow Pages claim page, which was blocked to our research tools, so confirm it opens for you.

What about verification? Thryv’s page does not describe an ownership check, and third-party guides disagree on whether it is a phone call, a text or an email. We could not walk the live form, so we cannot tell you which one applies today. Keep the business phone line and email you list reachable, and expect a confirmation step to be possible.

Before you publish, make sure the name, address and phone number match your website and your Google Business Profile character for character. Run the free NAP checker first if you are not sure what the open web currently shows, and see what NAP means if the term is new to you.

How to edit a Yellow Pages listing

Thryv’s flow has you fill in your details and publish your updates inside the free account you create when you claim, so editing should work the same way: sign in, change your details and publish. Two cautions apply.

First, Thryv still hosts an older Yellow Pages help page that says name, address and phone changes must be made through your local telephone service provider, and that updates to a paid advertising program go through your marketing consultant. That wording reads like print directory guidance and conflicts with the account-based claim flow, so we treat the claim flow as the current path for the online listing. We cannot confirm which route governs every record, so after a change, recheck the public page a day or two later.

Second, if the directory shows two records for your business, claim the one that is correct and contact Yellow Pages about the other rather than editing both (we found no official duplicate-merge process described). Our guide to finding and fixing duplicate listings covers that pattern, which applies on every directory.

Can you remove or cancel a Yellow Pages listing?

This is the part the official pages say the least about. On the pages we could open:

• Thryv’s Yellow Pages page, FAQ included, does not describe a self-service way to delete a business listing.
• The footer links to a Directory Opt-Out page. That page (yellowpagesoptout.com, which redirects to optoutyp.com) is about stopping the delivery of print phone books to a home address, and it says other requests should go directly to the publisher. It is not a business-listing removal form.
• Paid products are sold separately from the free listing, so cancelling one is likely a different conversation with Thryv from changing or removing the listing itself. The page does not describe cancellation either.

So the route we can stand behind is to contact Yellow Pages directly, and it is sensible to be ready to show that you own the business. Our list of business listing support contacts is a starting point for the general approach. Before you ask for removal, consider whether you would rather have a corrected listing: an accurate record on a well-known directory is more use to you than a gap, and a stale one you ignore is the real problem.

Watch for the “update your listing” phone call

Thryv’s own blog warns about a scam in which callers pose as a top listings site or directory, Yellow Pages and Google included, and offer to confirm and update your business information over the phone. Weeks later an invoice for hundreds of dollars arrives, and when you dispute it the company says an employee confirmed it verbally. Read the details on Thryv’s own warning (Thryv also sells listings management, so weigh its sales pitch accordingly, but the call pattern it describes is the one to watch for), and our guide to Google business listing scams covers the wider pattern.

The safe rule is simple: do not approve anything on an unsolicited call. Sign in to the real site yourself, ask any caller directly whether there is a fee, and do not say yes until you have checked who is calling.

”Yellow Pages” is a brand used by many unrelated directories

The US site is only one of many directories that use the name. Our catalog holds 20+ active Yellow Pages branded directories outside the US, run by different companies in different countries, plus a few vertical ones. Here are examples, grouped by region:

Region	Examples in our catalog
Americas, Oceania	Yellow Pages Canada (yellowpages.ca), Yellow Pages Australia, Yellow NZ
Europe	Yellow.lu (Luxembourg), Romanian Yellow Pages
South and Southeast Asia	Yellow Pages Singapore, PakistanYP, BangladeshYP, Yellow Pages Vietnam, IndonesiaYP, Thailand YellowPages, MalaysiaYP
Middle East and Africa	IsraeliYP, Yellow Pages Kenya, Yellow Pages Egypt
Vertical directories	Attorney Yellow Pages, HVAC Yellow Pages

The legal names behind them differ. At the time of writing, the footer of yellowpages.ca names Yellow Pages Digital & Media Solutions Limited, the Australian site’s footer names Thryv Australia Pty Ltd, and Thryv lists Yellowpages.com among its own brands. Even where Thryv’s name appears on more than one site, each site has its own free-listing form and its own public pages, and in our builds a listing on one does not update another. A listing on yellowpages.com does not put you in front of people searching the Canadian or Australian sites.

What we have seen in our own builds

Two outcomes from our own work, stated as they are:

• Yellow Pages Australia: we submitted a client on 2026-10-16, and our checker verified the public listing page live the same day.
• Yellow Pages Canada: the directory accepted our submission in June 2026, but our checker has not yet seen its public page, so we do not count that listing as live.

The difference between those two is the reason we separate “submitted” from “verified live”: acceptance is a message from the directory, while a live listing is a public page that shows your name, address and phone number.

The US yellowpages.com is not in our build set. We have not confirmed a reason from Yellow Pages’ own pages, so we will not guess at one. In practice that means a US business claims its listing itself, using the steps above, and then adds it to the rest of its citation set. Our United States citation sites page shows the directories we do build there, and the Australia and Canada pages show where the local Yellow Pages sit in each market’s list.

Does a Yellow Pages listing help local SEO?

Treat it as a citation, not a lever. A Yellow Pages profile is a public, structured record of your name, address and phone number, and consistent records like it feed the same trust signals search engines and AI assistants use to check that your business exists where you say it does. We know of no independent source that publishes Yellow Pages as a confirmed Google ranking factor, so the honest framing is that it is one more consistent data point, worth getting right because it is free.

A short checklist for your Yellow Pages listing

• Search first. Look for your business under your current name, a former name and an old phone number before adding anything.
• Match your master NAP exactly. The same name, address and phone as your website and Google Business Profile, with no abbreviation differences.
• Skip the paid products by default. The free listing is the citation. Buy advertising only as a separate marketing decision.
• Check the public page. After you publish, open the listing as a visitor and confirm the details.
• Ignore unsolicited calls. Make changes only by signing in yourself.
• Do the same for each country you trade in. Use the citation sites by country index to see which local directories carry the Yellow Pages name where you operate.

Common mistakes with Yellow Pages listings

• Assuming one Yellow Pages listing covers every country. The name is shared; the data is not.
• Paying for a listing that is free. The basic listing is free, per Thryv’s own page. Advertising is optional.
• Editing a duplicate instead of claiming the right record. That leaves two records competing with each other.
• Trusting a caller. A phone call is the most common way small businesses end up with a surprise invoice.
• Counting a submission as a listing. Until the public page exists and shows your details, nothing is live.

Yellow Pages alongside your other citations

Yellow Pages works best as one entry in a full set rather than a one-off. Our local citation finder shows the ranked citation sites in our catalog for your country and industry, including the local Yellow Pages branded ones where they exist.

Citation Builder records every live listing with its public URL and a screenshot, keeps your name, address and phone consistent across the directories it builds, and gives you listings that stay yours, with ongoing monitoring as the continuing value. See our citation building service for how that works across 50+ countries and 50+ industries.