In retrospective appraisals, Christopher Cross is regarded as a key release of yacht rock music. For Spin in 2009, Chuck Eddy lists it among the genre's eight essential albums. Vinyl Me, Please magazine's Timothy Malcolm includes it in his 2017 list of the 10 best yacht rock albums, explaining that, "It’s actually a sonic outlier for the yacht rock genre, heavy on acoustic guitar and strings. But its message fits the genre (a fool searching for inner peace), and yeah, it’s still undeniably smooth." For The Vinyl District's online publication in 2018, Michael H. Little calls it the genre's best album as well as one of its smoothest, crediting it for making Cross "the face of soft rock".
