Scraping the Yelp API
If you’re looking to scrape data from Yelp, such as reviews & business contact information, we have good & bad news. The good news is that it’s easy to get this data through the official Yelp Fusion API using our Yelp scraper, where you can extract data from Yelp for ratings, reviews & star ratings for any business category & city on Yelp via API calls.
The bad news is that the API limits you to extracting data on a whopping 3 (yes, three) whole reviews per business. This may be enough if your desired data is more around scraping the Yelp reviews of a general category and area for general market research, rather than going too deep into a single business’ reviews.
If you instead care more about scraping general businesses from an area, then Yelp may be a good solution as it easily allows you to target an entire city and paginate through the entire result set, unlike the Google Maps API Scraper which is limited to only extracting 60 businesses per search.
1. Get a Yelp API Key
To start the scraping process, you’ll need a Yelp account to use the API, and then you can create a Yelp App which will act as your client for retrieving data from Yelp. You’ll need the API Key from your new Yelp App to use the Fusion API for scraping Yelp data, so just look for the created key in the developer portal linked to above.
2. Find Businesses
Once you have your API key, check out our Yelp Business Scraper to scrape business data from search results. You can enter a search location and business type (free text query is fine) to get businesses back from Yelp, e.g. Bars in New York:
You can download the returned data in CSV format, but you won’t get too many useful fields back. You will get phone number and physical mailing address if you’re looking to do outreach. If you’d like to scrape emails from local businesses, we highly recommend seeing our Foursquare Business Email Scraper instead for that use case.
3. Scrape Reviews
To scrape reviews from Yelp, you’ll need to provide the Business ID into the Yelp Review Scraper, and you can then paste in any business ID to scrape the 3 most recent reviews for that business.
If you have a list of business IDs from Yelp (say from the search results page) and want to scrape the 3 most recent reviews for each business combined into a single CSV file, check out the Yelp Business Reviews - Multiple Business IDs Workflow, which will do this for you automatically.
Yelp Scraping Alternatives
You may also be interested in our Google Maps Scraper, which we support bulk scraping for 1,000s of businesses in any area. We also have a Google Reviews Scraper that returns 66% more reviews per business than the Yelp API! That’s right, Google will provide up to 5 reviews per business as opposed to 3 from Yelp’s API, so you may have better luck scraping more review data via Google than with Yelp.
Illegal Web Scraping
Yelp web scraping (through automated code that accesses the Yelp website) is not a good idea, as the website has numerous anti-scraping techniques put in place to block these web scraping attempts. These Yelp web scrapers will get your Yelp account banned if used while logged in, or at the very least get your IP address blacklisted.
So please just don’t engage in web scraping as it’s not worth the risk and time you’ll waste dealing with broken screen scrapers. Check out the API instead and if you need help downloading data from the API, please feel free to give our service a try!