Yelp Business Scraper

The Actor resolves a Yelp business URL slug — the alias in /biz/<alias> — to a structured record: star rating, categories, a structured address, phone number, price band, and photos. It accepts several aliases in one run, one request and one output row per alias.

Accepted input

Field	Type	Default	Description
alias	array of strings	— (required)	Yelp business slugs, one per line. A full https://www.yelp.com/biz/... URL is accepted too and reduced to the slug automatically.
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum businesses to save. 0 removes the limit. One row and one request per alias, so this also bounds the number of requests the run makes.

{
  "alias": ["tartine-bakery-san-francisco", "blue-bottle-coffee-mint-plaza-san-francisco"],
  "maxItems": 5
}

Response fields

Field	Contents
alias	The slug that was fetched, echoed back.
url	The business's page on Yelp, built from alias.
name	The business name. The one field here that is never null: a page that resolves but carries no name is treated as an error rather than as a business record full of nulls.
rating	The star rating Yelp displays, 1 to 5.
review_count_display	The review count exactly as Yelp prints it to a logged-out visitor — an abbreviation such as "9.2k", not an exact figure. Yelp does not publish an exact count at this tier, and the string is not expanded into a number here, since doing so would invent digits of precision Yelp never gave.
phone	The business's phone number.
price_range	Yelp's own price band, $ to $$$$.
categories	The business's Yelp categories. An empty array when the page lists none, never null.
address	A structured address (street_address, locality, region, postal_code, country). Null when the page carries no photos, since this is read from the photo list rather than from a listing block Yelp does not publish.
photos	Business photos, each with its image URL, caption, upload date, and uploader where Yelp names one.
reviews	Always null. See reviews_note and the FAQ below.
reviews_note	States, in the response itself, why reviews is always null.

{
  "alias": "tartine-bakery-san-francisco",
  "url": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/tartine-bakery-san-francisco",
  "name": "Tartine Bakery",
  "rating": 4.3,
  "review_count_display": "9.2k",
  "phone": "(415) 487-2600",
  "price_range": "$$",
  "categories": ["Bakeries", "Desserts", "Cafes"]
}

Behaviour on redirects and missing pages

Yelp redirects aliases freely: a plain slug can 301 to a disambiguated one, and a business that has moved or merged listings resolves to a different alias than the one requested. Redirects are followed, so a stale alias still resolves, and name — not the requested alias — is the authority on which business was actually returned.

An alias with no Yelp page for it is reported and skipped rather than ending the run; the rest of the list is still processed, and nothing is charged for it.

Frequently asked questions

Why is reviews always null? Yelp renders its review list client-side. A server-fetched page carries loading placeholders and no review prose at all, while the fields in this response — name, rating, address, phone, categories, and photos — are present in the markup itself and reach both a browser and a plain HTTP request equally. No input here changes that; reviews are simply not available at this tier.

Why is review_count_display a string like "9.2k" instead of a number? Because that is the only figure Yelp publishes to a logged-out client. The exact count appears nowhere on the page, so parsing "9.2k" into 9200 would be inventing precision rather than reporting it. A caller that wants an approximate number can parse the string itself, knowingly.

Why does address come back structured while everything else reads like plain text? Yelp publishes no LocalBusiness block on a business page. The one structured address available is attached to each photo in the page's own photo list, which is why address is null on the rare page with no photos rather than falling back to a street line scraped out of the markup.

Can this look up several businesses in one run? Yes. Every line in alias is one request and one row; a list of five hundred slugs makes five hundred requests, and one that resolves to no page is skipped rather than stopping the rest.

Related

Yelp Search Scraper finds businesses by search term and location when the alias is not already known, and can attach this same business record to each of its results.