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Editor’s note: This article is part 7 of the Pizza Power Report 2025. You can scroll down to the bottom to navigate to other sections of the report.
By Rick Hynum
Crowd-sourced review platforms, for better or worse, have made every restaurant customer a food critic. Granted, many of them jump onto Yelp or TripAdvisor to air their gripes and avenge what they perceive as poor service or overly long delivery times. Others put more thought, care and foodie knowledge into their reviews. And some users are just there to peruse the ratings and pick a dining option with four stars or higher.
As these platforms have grown and evolved, pizzeria operators have learned to live with them, even if they don’t necessarily like them. Savvy owners and managers have embraced them, responding promptly—and solicitously—to negative reviews in order to better manage their online reputation while expressing gratitude for the positive ones.
What do these platforms actually tell us about a pizzeria? Not much, really, but their influence is undeniable nevertheless. A restaurant with hundreds of reviews and a 4.5 rating on Yelp is likely to be a favorite in the community. And when Yelp releases its annual Top 100 Pizza Spots list (based on reviews by so-called Yelp Elites), it makes headline news around the country.
To develop what we call the People’s Choice ranking of the country’s most popular independent pizzerias according to crowd-sourced reviews, PMQ averaged out ratings for highly reviewed pizza restaurants on Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Facebook, attaching some weight to the total number of reviews. Many will be familiar from last year’s Pizza Power Report—Mister O1 in Grapevine, Texas, for example, still holds the No. 1 spot—while newcomers like Pizzeria Florian in East Aurora, New York, and Dominick’s Truck & Dine, a mobile operation in Ball Ground, Georgia, cracked the top 25 at No. 5 and No. 22 respectively.
The people have spoken! Check out the list below to see what they had to say.
NAVIGATING THE PIZZA POWER REPORT 2025
How Independents Keep Learning to Win vs. the Big Chains
Major Chains Lean into Value in So-Called ‘Pizza Wars’
Good Help Can Be Easier to Find With Some Creative Strategies
How Smart Technologies Can Ease Pizzerias’ Labor Problems
Venturing into the Frozen Frontier to Build a National Pizza Brand
C-Stores Are Taking ‘Gas Station Pizza’ to a New Level
America’s Most Popular Independent Pizzerias (Per Crowd-Sourced Reviews)
America’s 25 Most Critically Acclaimed Independent Pizzerias
The Top 30 Pizza Chains in the U.S.
The Top 10 Trending Pizza Styles for 2025
Most Popular and Fastest-Growing Pizza Toppings for 2025
