Yelp Scraper

Extract business listings, reviews, photos, hours, and contact information from Yelp at scale. Supports keyword + location search with automatic pagination, built-in rate limiting, Apify proxy rotation, and a Yelp Fusion API fallback for maximum reliability.

What does Yelp Scraper do?

This Actor searches Yelp for businesses matching your keywords and location(s), then extracts complete details for each result including:

• Business info — name, address, phone, website, price range
• Ratings & reviews — star rating, review count, full review text, reviewer name, date
• Categories — all business categories listed on Yelp
• Operating hours — full weekly schedule
• Photos — direct URLs to all business photos
• Coordinates — latitude / longitude

Use Cases

• Competitive intelligence & market research
• Lead generation for sales teams
• Local SEO analysis
• Aggregating restaurant/service reviews
• Building location-based datasets

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	string[]	["restaurants"]	Keywords to search (e.g. "car wash", "dentist")
locations	string[]	["Los Angeles, CA"]	Locations to search
maxResults	integer	50	Max businesses per query+location combo
scrapeReviews	boolean	true	Also scrape reviews
maxReviewsPerBusiness	integer	20	Max reviews per business
scrapePhotos	boolean	true	Collect photo URLs
scrapeHours	boolean	true	Collect operating hours
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	Proxy settings (residential recommended)
rateLimitDelayMs	integer	2000	Delay between requests (ms)
maxConcurrency	integer	3	Parallel browser sessions
yelpFusionApiKey	string	—	Optional Yelp API key for fallback
startUrls	URL[]	—	Advanced: directly provide Yelp URLs

Output

Each business is saved as a JSON object in the default Dataset:

{
  "name": "Joe's Pizza",
  "url": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/joes-pizza-new-york-2",
  "phone": "(212) 366-1182",
  "address": "7 Carmine St, New York, NY 10014",
  "rating": 4.5,
  "reviewCount": 4821,
  "categories": ["Pizza", "Italian"],
  "priceRange": "$$",
  "website": "https://www.joespizzanyc.com",
  "hours": {
    "Mon": "10:00–04:00",
    "Tue": "10:00–04:00",
    "Wed": "10:00–04:00",
    "Thu": "10:00–04:00",
    "Fri": "10:00–05:00",
    "Sat": "10:00–05:00",
    "Sun": "10:00–04:00"
  },
  "photos": [
    "https://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/xxx/o/photo1.jpg",
    "https://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/yyy/o/photo2.jpg"
  ],
  "coordinates": { "lat": 40.7303, "lng": -74.0024 },
  "isClosed": false,
  "source": "scrape",
  "scrapedAt": "2024-06-01T12:00:00.000Z",
  "reviews": [
    {
      "userName": "Jane D.",
      "rating": 5,
      "date": "2024-05-15",
      "reviewText": "Best pizza in NYC, hands down. The crust is perfect.",
      "source": "dom"
    }
  ]
}

Anti-blocking & Reliability

• Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy (recommended)
• Stealth Playwright — headless Chromium with webdriver fingerprint masking
• Configurable rate limiting — default 2 second delay between requests
• Automatic retries — up to 3 retries with exponential back-off
• Yelp Fusion API fallback — if scraping fails, falls back to the official API (requires free API key)
• State persistence — survives Actor migrations/restarts

Performance & Cost

Setup	Speed	Cost estimate
Residential proxies	~50 biz/min	~$5 per 1,000 businesses
Datacenter proxies	~100 biz/min	~$2 per 1,000 businesses
No proxy (testing)	~30 biz/min	Free (may get blocked)

Getting a Yelp Fusion API Key (optional)

1. Go to https://www.yelp.com/developers
2. Create a free app
3. Copy the API key into the yelpFusionApiKey input field

Note: The free Fusion API tier returns a maximum of 3 reviews per business and 1,000 calls/day. The scraper does not have these limitations.

Legal & Terms of Service

This Actor is provided for educational and research purposes. Always review Yelp's Terms of Service and robots.txt before scraping. Use responsibly and respect rate limits.