How to Scrape Yelp Business Reviews
Yelp is one of the most important platforms for local business reviews. Scraping Yelp with ScrapingLab lets you monitor competitor reviews, analyze customer sentiment, and build business databases.
What You Can Extract
- Business name and category
- Address and phone number
- Star rating and total review count
- Price range indicator
- Individual review text and ratings
- Reviewer information
- Photos count
- Operating hours
Step-by-Step with ScrapingLab
1. Set Up Your Search
Start with a Yelp search URL:
https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=coffee+shops&find_loc=San+Francisco
2. Build Your Workflow — Business Listings
- Navigate — Go to the Yelp search URL
- Wait — Wait for results to load (2-3 seconds)
- Extract — From each business card:
- Business name
- Rating (star count)
- Review count
- Price range
- Category
- Address snippet
- Screenshot — Capture the search results
3. Extract Individual Reviews
For detailed review data:
- Navigate — Go to the individual business page
- Wait — Wait for reviews to load
- Extract — From each review:
- Review text
- Star rating
- Date posted
- Reviewer name
- Scroll — Scroll to load more reviews
- Loop — Paginate through review pages
4. Schedule and Export
- Run weekly to track new reviews for your business or competitors
- Export to CSV for sentiment analysis
- Send to webhooks to trigger alerts when new reviews appear
Common Challenges
JavaScript Rendering
Yelp uses JavaScript to load reviews. ScrapingLab’s browser engine handles this automatically, but allow 2-3 seconds for content to render.
Pagination
Yelp shows 10 reviews per page. Use the pagination steps to navigate through all reviews. For businesses with hundreds of reviews, set realistic page limits.
Content Variations
Yelp shows different layouts on mobile vs desktop. ScrapingLab uses a desktop browser viewport by default, which provides the most complete data.
Best Practices
- Focus on competitors — Monitor reviews for competing businesses to identify their strengths and weaknesses
- Track trends — Schedule regular runs to spot review trends over time
- Respect the platform — Keep request volumes moderate and avoid scraping all of Yelp
- Combine with analysis — Export reviews to CSV and use tools like Excel or Python for sentiment analysis