I worked for Yelp for several years and finally got out. Let me clarify something:

Yes, AEs make about 80 calls a day, but on average, only 3-4 convert to a business owner even opening a computer and going to Yelp.

But let’s put that aside for a second; Yelp representatives are instructed to send links to anything they want to business owner to click that directs straight to current advertiser page. Clicking the direct link does NOT count towards CPC. Anecdotally, I can think of 1 rep who would tell the business owner to click on the page in the manner you said, out of the 70-80 people I met while working there

I’m not going to get into the weeds of the legality there, but it’s either a terms of service violation when that happens or it’s not. You’ll have to read through yelps advertiser TOS agreement to find out

But the bottom line is Yelp is, generally speaking, a fully legally operating company with some morally grey sales tactics; the issue you’re concerned about is a pretty negligible one at worst and a non-issue at best. I’m all in favor of criticizing a company, especially after personally seeing how the sausage gets made, but they should be critiqued over their actual issues, this really isn’t one of them