Is it legal to scrape Yelp?
Web scraping legality depends on how you use the data and your compliance with relevant laws and terms of service.
Legal considerations
Generally legal uses
- Scraping publicly available data for research, analysis, or personal use
- Market research and business intelligence
- Monitoring your own business listings and reviews
- Academic research on consumer behavior
- Lead generation using public business information
Important limitations
- Terms of Service: Review and comply with Yelp's ToS
- Rate limiting: Avoid overloading Yelp's servers with excessive requests
- Personal data: Handle any personal information according to GDPR/privacy laws
- Review content: User reviews may be copyrighted by the author
- Commercial use: Be mindful of how you use extracted data
Best practices
- Use data responsibly: Focus on business intelligence, not data reselling
- Respect rate limits: Our API includes built-in rate limiting
- Add delays: Configure appropriate wait times between requests
- Use appropriate proxies: Avoid IP bans with our managed proxies
- Attribution: Give credit to Yelp when using review data
- Ethical business practices: Don't use data for fake reviews or manipulation
Yelp's official stance
Yelp provides an official Fusion API for some use cases:
- Limited free tier: 5000 API calls per day
- Business endpoints: Access to business information
- Review endpoints: Access to reviews (with limitations)
- Search functionality: Search for businesses
However, the official API has limitations:
- Review text is limited to excerpts
- Some data fields not available
- Rate limits may be restrictive
- Requires API key approval
Disclaimer
We provide tools for data extraction. You are responsible for:
- Ensuring your use case is legal in your jurisdiction
- Complying with Yelp's terms of service
- Following data protection regulations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.)
- Respecting user privacy and intellectual property
- Not using data to create fake reviews or manipulate ratings
When in doubt, consult a legal professional before scraping business review platforms.