# Yelp Reviews Scraper (new-review monitor, no personal data) (`integrative_cafe_8pc/yelp-reviews-scraper`) Actor

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.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/integrative_cafe_8pc/yelp-reviews-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Bluefield Data](https://apify.com/integrative_cafe_8pc) (community)
- **Categories:** Automation
- **Security:** Limited permissions
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $0.12 / 1,000 reviews

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.
Since this Actor supports Apify Store discounts, the price gets lower the higher subscription plan you have.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## 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:

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

### Output example

```json
{
  "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:

```json
{"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.

# Actor input Schema

## `businesses` (type: `array`):

One business per line: a Yelp business link (https://www.yelp.com/biz/gary-danko-san-francisco), the alias from that link (gary-danko-san-francisco) or the Yelp business id. Any Yelp country site works (yelp.com, yelp.ca, yelp.co.uk).

## `maxReviewsPerBusiness` (type: `integer`):

Stop after this many reviews per business. 0 means every review the business has.

## `sortBy` (type: `string`):

Order in which reviews are collected. Monitor mode and 'Only reviews since' always use newest first.

## `ratings` (type: `array`):

Only reviews with these star ratings. Leave empty for all. Example: 1 and 2 to collect complaints only.

## `onlyReviewsSince` (type: `string`):

Only reviews posted on or after this date (2026-01-31) or within the last N days ('30 days'). Leave empty for no date limit.

## `onlyNewReviews` (type: `boolean`):

Remember which reviews were already returned and, on every next run, return only reviews posted since. The first run returns the latest reviews and saves them as the starting point. Schedule the Actor daily to get a feed of new Yelp reviews.

## `language` (type: `string`):

Two-letter language code of the reviews to collect (en, es, fr, zh...).

## `maxConcurrency` (type: `integer`):

How many businesses are collected at the same time, from 1 to 5. Lower is gentler on Yelp.

## `proxy` (type: `object`):

Proxy settings. The default Apify datacenter proxy works and keeps the cost low; if Yelp keeps blocking it, the run moves to residential proxy by itself.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "businesses": [
    "https://www.yelp.com/biz/gary-danko-san-francisco",
    "tartine-bakery-san-francisco-3"
  ],
  "maxReviewsPerBusiness": 20,
  "sortBy": "newest",
  "ratings": [],
  "onlyNewReviews": false,
  "language": "en",
  "maxConcurrency": 3,
  "proxy": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `overview` (type: `string`):

No description

## `results` (type: `string`):

No description

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "businesses": [
        "https://www.yelp.com/biz/gary-danko-san-francisco",
        "tartine-bakery-san-francisco-3"
    ],
    "maxReviewsPerBusiness": 20,
    "proxy": {
        "useApifyProxy": true
    }
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("integrative_cafe_8pc/yelp-reviews-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "businesses": [
        "https://www.yelp.com/biz/gary-danko-san-francisco",
        "tartine-bakery-san-francisco-3",
    ],
    "maxReviewsPerBusiness": 20,
    "proxy": { "useApifyProxy": True },
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("integrative_cafe_8pc/yelp-reviews-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "businesses": [
    "https://www.yelp.com/biz/gary-danko-san-francisco",
    "tartine-bakery-san-francisco-3"
  ],
  "maxReviewsPerBusiness": 20,
  "proxy": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}' |
apify call integrative_cafe_8pc/yelp-reviews-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,integrative_cafe_8pc/yelp-reviews-scraper"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/TL8ynOsgnZQY3tsFq/builds/ohV43zuk5zRJOiqKx/openapi.json