Yelp Scraper

Yelp Scraper: businesses, ratings and contact details from Yelp's own API

Search Yelp by term and city, or name business pages directly, and get structured rows back: name, category, star rating, review count, price band, phone, full address, postcode and coordinates.

It runs on Yelp's official Fusion API, and the key is yours. Yelp gives one away free in about two minutes. Without it the run returns one labelled sample row so you can see the shape, and nothing more.

🍽️ What Yelp Scraper does

You give it searches in the form {term} in {location}, or a single term and location in their own boxes, or the URLs of business pages you already know. It walks the results in pages of 50 and delivers one row per business, deduped by Yelp's own business id.

Every row carries the lead-list fields people actually want: phone, street address, city, state, postcode, latitude and longitude, alongside the rating and review count. Ask for reviews and each row gains a reviews array with the author, star rating, excerpt, date and permalink.

The key stays yours and is marked secret, so it is not stored with the run input.

📥 What you give it

{
  "searchQueries": ["coffee in San Francisco", "plumbers in Austin, TX"],
  "maxItems": 50,
  "maxReviews": 3,
  "yelpApiKey": "your-fusion-api-key"
}

A URL without yelp.com/biz/ in it is dropped silently, with no row to tell you. Check the links before a large run.

📤 What you get back

There is no keyed run in this actor's recent history to quote from, so this is the labelled sample row the actor itself returns when no key is supplied, with its explanatory note field left out. A real row carries the same fields with source set to yelp-fusion-api:

{
  "ok": true,
  "_sample": true,
  "name": "Sample Coffee Bar",
  "yelpUrl": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/sample-coffee-bar-san-francisco",
  "slug": "sample-coffee-bar-san-francisco",
  "category": "Coffee & Tea",
  "rating": 4.5,
  "reviewCount": 128,
  "price": "$$",
  "phone": "(415) 555-0100",
  "address": "123 Sample St, San Francisco, CA 94103",
  "city": "San Francisco",
  "state": "CA",
  "zip": "94103",
  "lat": 37.7749,
  "lng": -122.4194,
  "isAd": false,
  "businessId": "sample-business-id",
  "source": "sample",
  "reviews": []
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can land in your dataset.

Rows arrive at the end. Every search finishes before anything is written, so a run with several queries shows an empty dataset until it is done. If one search fails partway, the run reports that failure and delivers nothing rather than a partial set, so keep runs to a handful of searches.

▶️ How to run it

1. Create a free key at Yelp's developer site and copy the API Key. 2. Open Yelp Scraper and click Try for free. 3. Put one search per line into Search queries, each written {term} in {location}. 4. Paste your key into Yelp Fusion API key, set Max businesses, then click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$3.00 per 1,000 businesses, which is $0.003 each. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per business row delivered. Reviews attached to a row are included, duplicates are dropped before they reach you, and the keyless sample row and diagnostic rows are not billed as businesses. Yelp's own API is free at the volumes most people run.

💡 What people use it for

• Building a call list for a trade in a city, with phone and address already on the row.
• Mapping where a category clusters, using lat and lng straight into a map tool.
• Tracking a set of locations' ratings and review counts over time, keyed on businessId.
• Pulling the top few reviews for a shortlist of places to read what people actually say.

🚧 What it does not do

• It does not include a Yelp key. The key is free, but it is yours to create and yours to paste

in.

• Three reviews per business, maximum. Yelp's API returns three excerpts and no more, so a

higher maxReviews changes nothing. For deep review history, Yelp is not the source for it here.

• Review text is an excerpt, not the full review, and there is no owner reply.
• No photos, no menus, no opening hours, no attributes.
• The Slack and Notion delivery options in the input do not currently send anything. The fields

are there, results are always in the dataset, and nothing is posted or written to those apps.

• countryCode does not change the results. It only fills in the location when a search entry

has no in {place} part.

• The result depth stops at 1,000 because Yelp's search does. Narrow the term or the area rather

than raising the number.

• Duplicates are removed after the cap is applied, so a run across overlapping searches can come

back a little short of maxItems.

🧭 Which local business scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

How do I get a Yelp key? Create an app at Yelp's developer site and copy the API Key field. It takes a couple of minutes and costs nothing. Pasting the Client ID by mistake is the usual cause of a BAD_INPUT row.

Why only three reviews? That is Yelp's own limit on what the API returns per business.

Can I mix searches and business URLs in one run? Yes. Both feed the same list and share maxItems.

Why is price empty on some rows? Because Yelp has no price band for that business. Same for phone on businesses that never listed one.

Can I schedule it? Yes. A weekly run on the same searches, keyed on businessId, shows you what opened, closed or moved.

Is scraping Yelp data legal? This uses Yelp's own API under their developer terms, so read those for what you may do with the data. Reviews carry personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the search you used. Never send your API key. The errorCode and hint on the diagnostic row usually name the problem on their own.