Yell.com Scraper — UK Business Directory

Pay-per-result: $1.50/1K businesses. Phone contacts included. No monthly fee, no minimum.

Yell.com has 5 million+ UK business listings. Whether you're building a local prospecting list, auditing local competitors, or enriching a CRM — this actor gives you clean, structured data at $1.50 per 1,000 records.

Scrape UK business listings from Yell.com — the UK's leading online business directory. Ideal for B2B lead generation, local business research, and market intelligence.

This actor uses Apify Residential proxy (auto-configured, billed to your Apify account — zero external setup).

What you get

Field	Description
business_id	Yell internal numeric ID
name	Business display name
category	Business category (e.g. "Plumbers")
schema_type	schema.org type (e.g. "Plumber")
phone	Primary phone number
website	External website URL (when listed)
address	Address text from listing card
yell_url	Full Yell.com business page URL
search_keywords	Your search query
search_location	Your location query
parse_confidence	0–1 quality score per record
warnings	Machine-readable quality flags

Input

{
  "keywords": "plumber",
  "location": "London",
  "maxResults": 100,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

• keywords — business type or service (e.g. "dentist", "electrician")
• location — UK city or area (e.g. "Manchester", "Birmingham")
• maxResults — max businesses to return (0 = no limit, ~25/page)
• proxyConfiguration — required: use Apify Proxy RESIDENTIAL group

Pricing example

Run size	Cost
100 businesses	$0.15
500 businesses	$0.75
1,000 businesses	$1.50
5,000 businesses	$7.50

Apify RESIDENTIAL proxy is billed separately to your Apify account at standard proxy rates — no extra subscription.

Output sample

{
  "business_id": "90123456",
  "name": "City Plumbers Ltd",
  "category": "Plumbers",
  "schema_type": "Plumber",
  "phone": "020 7946 0123",
  "website": "https://cityplumbers.co.uk",
  "address": "14 Baker Street, London W1U 3BW",
  "yell_url": "https://www.yell.com/biz/city-plumbers-ltd-london-90123456/",
  "search_keywords": "plumber",
  "search_location": "London",
  "parse_confidence": 0.9,
  "warnings": []
}

FAQ

Do I need a proxy or API key? No external proxy subscription needed. Apify RESIDENTIAL proxy is pre-configured in the input — Yell.com requires residential IPs and this is handled automatically. Proxy costs are billed to your Apify account at standard rates.

What export formats are available? JSON, CSV, Excel, and XML — all downloadable from the dataset page or via the Apify REST API.

Can I schedule regular runs? Yes. Use Apify Scheduler (or n8n/Zapier) to run on a cadence and push new results to Google Sheets, a database, or a webhook automatically.

What if the actor returns no results? Verify that keywords and location match Yell's search terms (e.g. "London" not "London, UK"). If you see a blocked/empty response without proxy, the pre-configured RESIDENTIAL proxy resolves this.

Why this beats the competition

	This actor	Typical Yell scrapers
Parse method	schema.org itemprop (resilient)	CSS class names (breaks on deploy)
parse_confidence score	Yes — per record	No
Phone included	Yes (in base event)	Often missing
Proxy setup	Auto (Apify RESIDENTIAL)	Manual proxy required
Price	$1.50/1K	$3-5/1K or flat fee

Every record ships a parse_confidence score (0.0–1.0). Below 0.7 is a machine-readable signal that the page structure has drifted — your data pipeline can filter automatically.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This scraper is callable as a tool by AI agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, n8n, LangGraph, CrewAI, or any MCP-compatible client) via Apify's hosted Model Context Protocol server. An agent uses it to look up UK local businesses with phone numbers and addresses mid-conversation — e.g. "find plumbers in Manchester", "list electricians in Birmingham for our outreach".

Point your MCP client at this tool:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=bovi/yell-businesses",
        "--header",
        "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Technical notes

• Data parsed from schema.org microdata (itemprop attributes) — structural and resilient to layout changes.
• 25 businesses per page, up to 5,000+ results per query.
• Address availability varies — some listings show "We serve [area]" rather than a street address.
• Not affiliated with Yell.com.

Integrations

Built for B2B lead-gen teams and local-SEO agencies building UK prospect lists by category and location — the JSON/dataset output drops into the tools you already run, no glue code:

• n8n / Make / Zapier — trigger a run or pipe every new dataset item into 500+ apps (Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, HubSpot, your database) with no code: n8n, Make, Zapier.
• Webhooks — fire your own endpoint the moment a run finishes, to push results straight into your pipeline (docs).
• MCP server — expose this actor as a tool to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client so an AI agent can pull this data mid-conversation (guide).
• API & SDKs — fetch the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel through the Apify REST API or the Python / JS SDKs.

See all Apify integrations.