Yellow Pages Kenya Scraper - Kenya Business Directory

Scrape Yellow Pages Kenya (yellowpageskenya.com) — Kenya's business directory. Browse any of 120 curated business categories, run a free-text search across the whole site, or fetch full business profiles by URL. Get names, addresses, phone numbers, categories, regions, GPS coordinates, and websites. No login, no cookies, no API key required.

What this actor does

• Three modes: byCategory (curated category dropdown), search (free-text keyword search), and detail (direct business profile URLs)
• 120 curated categories verified to return real results, or type any custom category slug
• All 47 Kenyan counties available as a client-side region filter (Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, and every other county)
• Sort by relevance, rating, or name (A-Z)
• Filter by county/region or minimum star rating (1-5)
• Rich business profiles — description, opening hours, payment methods accepted, precise address, and GPS coordinates
• Empty fields are omitted — you only ever see fields that were actually found for a business

Output per business

• name — business name
• category — business category
• region, locality — Kenyan county/region and specific area
• address — full street address
• latitude, longitude — GPS coordinates (when available)
• phone, mobilePhone, fax — landline, mobile, and fax contact numbers (when published)
• branchName — specific branch/outlet name for multi-location businesses (when published)
• email, website — contact email and website (when published)
• logoUrl — business logo image
• rating, ratingCount — average star rating (1-5) and number of ratings (only present once a business has at least one)
• listingPackage — the business's paid directory package tier as published by yellowpageskenya.com, e.g. "Gold", "Silver", "Bronze", "Basic" (only present for businesses on a paid package)
• description — company description (when profile fetched)
• openingHours — business hours as published (when profile fetched)
• paymentMethods[] — accepted payment methods, e.g. ["CASH", "MPESA"] (when profile fetched)
• street, country — structured address parts (when profile fetched)
• searchCategory / searchQuery, searchRegion — the search parameters used
• sourceUrl — canonical yellowpageskenya.com profile URL for the business
• recordType: "business", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string (select)	byCategory	byCategory, search, or detail (fetch by URL)
category	string (select)	restaurants	Pick a curated category, or custom to use customCategory (mode=byCategory)
customCategory	string	–	Free-text category, overrides category (mode=byCategory) — works best for simple, single-word category names
searchQuery	string	restaurants	Free-text keyword search across business names and categories (mode=search)
region	string (select)	–	Kenyan county to filter to, applied client-side
sortBy	string (select)	relevance	relevance / rating (highest first) / name (A-Z) — applied client-side across the fetched batch
minRating	integer	0 (no minimum)	Only return businesses rated at least 1-5 stars
fetchDetails	boolean	false	Also visit each business's profile page for description, opening hours, payment methods, and precise address (slower)
businessUrls	array	–	yellowpageskenya.com business-details URLs to fetch directly (mode=detail)
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap on returned records (1-500)

Example: browse supermarkets

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "supermarkets",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: highest-rated hotels in Nairobi, with full profiles

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "hotels",
  "region": "Nairobi",
  "sortBy": "rating",
  "fetchDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 30
}

Example: free-text search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "hardware Nakuru",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: fetch specific business profiles

{
  "mode": "detail",
  "businessUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.yellowpageskenya.com/business-category/supermarkets/business-details/2852097-eastmatt-ltd" }
  ]
}

Use cases

• Local lead generation — build a prospect list of Kenyan businesses by category and county for B2B outreach
• Market research — measure business density for a category across Kenyan regions
• Directory aggregation — feed structured Kenyan business data into your own local-search product
• Competitor mapping — see who else operates in a category and county, with contact info
• Franchise & site-selection analysis — evaluate business coverage across Kenya's 47 counties

Limitations

• Category browsing only covers 120 curated categories. yellowpageskenya.com's own category list has 1600+ entries, but most contain & or commas whose exact internal URL slug can't be reliably derived from the display name (verified via testing: the site's category API requires an exact slug match and returns zero results, not an error, on a mismatch). The 120 categories offered here were individually verified to return real businesses. For anything outside this list, use search mode instead — free-text search does not require an exact slug and matches business names and categories site-wide.
• search and byCategory results are capped at roughly 300 records per query. This is the underlying site's own limit, not a bug in this actor — both the search-results page and the category API consistently return a maximum of ~300 businesses regardless of the requested maxItems. For larger volumes, split into multiple category- or region-scoped runs.
• region filtering is applied client-side. yellowpageskenya.com does not expose a server-side location filter on category or search pages, so this actor fetches the full category/search result set and filters by the business's own region/locality fields afterward.
• sortBy, and minRating are applied client-side across the batch of records this run actually fetched, not the entire category.
• GPS coordinates of (0, 0) (the site's own placeholder for un-geocoded businesses) are treated as missing and omitted rather than shown as a real location.

FAQ

What data source does this actor use? It reads yellowpageskenya.com's own public JSON API for category browsing, and its server-rendered search and business-details pages (data extracted directly from the page's initial HTML response — no browser rendering is used). No account or API key is needed.

Is this affiliated with Yellow Pages Kenya? No. This is an independent, third-party actor that reads publicly accessible data.

Why do some businesses have no rating, email, or website? yellowpageskenya.com only shows contact/website details a business itself provided, and a star rating only once a business has received one. Fields with no data are simply omitted from the record rather than shown as empty or null.

Can I search a category that's not in the dropdown? Yes — use search mode with the category name as your searchQuery, e.g. "searchQuery": "advertising marketing agencies". Free-text search works for any category, unlike byCategory mode which needs an exact internal slug match.

Does this actor need a proxy or login? No — yellowpageskenya.com's category API and pages are served without any anti-bot challenge that blocks Apify's free datacenter proxy, so this actor runs entirely on Apify's free plan with no proxy and no credentials.

Why is fetchDetails off by default? Fetching each business's full profile page requires one extra request per result, which is slower. Turn it on when you need description, opening hours, payment methods, or precise structured address.