Scraping the Yelp API
If you’re looking to scrape data from the Yelp API, 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 data scraper, where you can scrape reviews & star rating for any business on Yelp.
The bad news is that the Yelp API limits you to 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.
1. Get a Yelp API Key
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 their API for scraping Yelp data.
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 the Yelp API, 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 Yelp 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 Yelp as it’s not worth the risk and time you’ll waste dealing with broken screen scrapers. Check out the Yelp API instead and if you need help downloading data from the Yelp API, please feel free to give our service a try!