Yelp Search Scraper

Searches Yelp for businesses matching a description and location, and returns the results as structured data — name, rating, review count, price tier, neighborhood, open/closed status, categories, review snippet, and thumbnail. Optionally visits each business's own page for phone, address, hours, amenities, and photos.

What you get

For each business found:

Field	Description
title	Business name
link	Yelp business page URL
rating	Star rating (e.g. 4.5)
reviews	Review count
price	Price tier ($–$$$$), when Yelp shows one
neighborhoods	Neighborhood or area
open_state	e.g. "Open until 9:00 PM"
categories	Business categories, each with a title and link
snippet	An excerpt from a featured review
thumbnail	Listing photo URL

With Scrape full detail pages turned on, each result is enriched with:

Field	Description
phone, address	Contact details
website	The business's own site, if listed
status	e.g. "Permanently closed", when applicable
hours	Full weekly hours
amenities	e.g. "Takes reservations; Offers take-out; Accepts credit cards"
people_also_searched	Related searches Yelp surfaces on the page
photo_urls	All photo URLs from the business's gallery

Input

Field	Required	Default	Notes
Search description (findDesc)	Yes	—	What to search for, e.g. "Indian Veg Restaurants"
Location (findLoc)	Yes	—	Where to search, e.g. "Quebec City, Quebec, Canada"
Scrape full detail pages (scrapeDetails)	No	true	Turn off for a faster run using only the search-result summary
Max concurrent detail-page requests (maxConcurrency)	No	3	Start low (2–5) — all requests in a run share one identity
Refresh cookie cache only (refreshCookieOnly)	No	false	Skips scraping entirely; just warms the shared cookie cache. Meant to be triggered on a Schedule so real runs rarely pay the mint cost live

Results per run

Each run returns the top page of Yelp search results for the given query — up to 10 businesses. This is a deliberate design choice, not a current limitation: Yelp's bot protection distinguishes an automated visitor requesting page 2+ of results from one just viewing the first page, and reliably blocks the former regardless of how the request is made. Ten real, verified results per query is the trade-off this Actor makes for consistent reliability instead of an unreliable deeper crawl.

How it handles Yelp's bot protection

Yelp protects its pages with DataDome, which requires a real browser to solve a JavaScript challenge before serving content. This Actor mints that challenge cookie automatically using a real (non-headless) Chrome browser running against a virtual display — no manual cookie copying required. The resulting cookie is cached across runs, so most runs reuse an already-solved cookie in a few seconds rather than paying the ~70–90s mint cost every time.

If a request is blocked despite a cached cookie, the Actor still returns whatever data it already collected, then refreshes the cookie afterward for the next run — a block never costs you a delayed or empty result if any data was already in hand.

Tips

• Requests from this Actor use Apify's Residential Proxy automatically when available.
• Running several searches at the exact same moment increases the chance any single one gets blocked (they briefly share one exit IP). Staggering concurrent runs by a few seconds avoids this.
• For scheduled/unattended use, set up an Apify Schedule that runs with Refresh cookie cache only enabled every 20–30 minutes, so on-demand runs almost always find a warm cookie waiting.