Yelp Reviews Scraper (new-review monitor, no personal data)

Use this Actor when you need Yelp reviews of one or many businesses: rating, full text, date, votes, photos and owner replies, past the 3-review cap. Monitor mode returns only reviews posted since the last run. No reviewer names or profiles. Failed businesses are not charged.

Paste Yelp business links, aliases or ids and get one clean row per review, straight from Yelp's own review feed. It works as a Yelp reviews API for dashboards, reputation alerts, sentiment analysis and AI training sets.

What you get for each review

• Star rating (1 to 5), full review text and language
• Date posted, in UTC and in the business's local time
• Useful, funny and cool vote counts, and whether the review is an updated one
• Links to the photos and videos the reviewer posted of the business
• The owner's public reply: text, date and role (owner or manager)
• The business: name, alias, id, link, overall rating, total reviews and the count of reviews per star

Reviewer name, photo, profile link, location and friend counts are not returned. If an owner reply starts with "Hi Sarah," it comes back as "Hi,". You get what customers think of the business without storing personal data, which keeps the dataset simpler to handle under GDPR and CCPA.

Why this one

• Monitor mode. Turn on onlyNewReviews, schedule the Actor daily, and every run returns only the reviews posted since the run before. The first run returns the latest reviews and saves them as the starting point. In our test, removing the 2 newest reviews from the saved state made the next run return exactly those 2.
• Filters that save money. Collect only 1 and 2 star reviews to track complaints, or only reviews from the last 30 days. Paging stops as soon as reviews get older than your date, so you do not pay for reviews you will throw away.
• Built to finish. A blocked request gets a fresh proxy session with growing waits, and the run moves from datacenter to residential proxy by itself if datacenter keeps being blocked. In our test, 5 of 5 real businesses (New York, San Francisco, Austin, Toronto) returned 150 of 150 reviews with 0 errors in 20 seconds.
• Failures are free. A business that does not exist or cannot be fetched comes back with an error field and is not charged. The same business listed twice is fetched once.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
businesses	list of strings	2 sample businesses	One per line: https://www.yelp.com/biz/gary-danko-san-francisco, gary-danko-san-francisco or the Yelp business id. yelp.ca and yelp.co.uk links work too
maxReviewsPerBusiness	integer	20	Stop after this many reviews per business; 0 means all
sortBy	string	newest	newest, oldest, highest, lowest or relevance
ratings	list	all	Star ratings to include, for example ["1", "2"]
onlyReviewsSince	string	empty	2026-01-31 or 30 days
onlyNewReviews	boolean	false	Monitor mode: return only reviews not returned before
language	string	en	Language of the reviews to collect
maxConcurrency	integer	3	Businesses collected at the same time, 1 to 5
proxy	object	Apify datacenter	Proxy settings

Example, daily complaint alert:

{
  "businesses": ["https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-cheesecake-factory-san-francisco-12"],
  "ratings": ["1", "2"],
  "onlyNewReviews": true,
  "maxReviewsPerBusiness": 0
}

Output example

{
  "reviewId": "7sjDbjVXgEjTWM3AxuhijQ",
  "reviewUrl": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/katzs-delicatessen-new-york?hrid=7sjDbjVXgEjTWM3AxuhijQ",
  "rating": 5,
  "text": "I've had quite a few reubens and this place sets the bar for the best. The pastrami is so moist and perfectly seasoned...",
  "language": "en",
  "date": "2026-10-31T16:23:52Z",
  "localDate": "2026-10-31T12:23:52-04:00",
  "usefulCount": 0,
  "funnyCount": 0,
  "coolCount": 0,
  "isUpdatedReview": false,
  "photoUrls": ["https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/jyQPpqE3kUFvHYsfa3CQPA/o.jpg"],
  "videoUrls": [],
  "ownerReply": {"text": "Hi, we're glad you enjoyed our food. We look forward to your next visit.", "date": "2026-10-30T16:38:53Z", "role": "MANAGER"},
  "businessId": "V7lXZKBDzScDeGB8JmnzSA",
  "businessAlias": "katzs-delicatessen-new-york",
  "businessName": "Katz's Delicatessen",
  "businessUrl": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/katzs-delicatessen-new-york",
  "businessRating": 4.1,
  "businessReviewCount": 17126,
  "businessRatingDistribution": {"1": 1074, "2": 960, "3": 1908, "4": 4421, "5": 8768},
  "input": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/katzs-delicatessen-new-york",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-01T07:27:28Z"
}

A failed business comes back as:

{"input": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/this-place-does-not-exist", "error": "Yelp has no business page 'this-place-does-not-exist'"}

Pricing

Pricing: you pay per result, failures are free. One result is one review in the dataset. Businesses that fail, duplicates and monitor runs with nothing new cost nothing per result.

Tips

• For a reputation dashboard, schedule a daily run with onlyNewReviews on and connect the dataset to Google Sheets, Slack or a webhook through Apify integrations.
• To pull the full history of a business once, set maxReviewsPerBusiness to 0 and sortBy to oldest.
• Yelp hides some reviews as "not recommended"; those are not part of the public review feed and are not returned.