You want to know what people are saying about a restaurant, a plumber or a salon, maybe your own business, maybe a competitor down the street, maybe the hundred locations you are thinking about partnering with. Copying star ratings and review snippets out of a browser one listing at a time does not scale past an afternoon. Yelp offers the same local business data through an API, which is a way for one piece of software to ask another for information, so a spreadsheet script, your CRM or an AI assistant can look up businesses and pull their reviews for you.
What Yelp does
Yelp is the local business directory and review site most people already use to pick a place for dinner. Behind the website sits the Yelp Fusion API, which Yelp says gives developers programmatic access to its database of local businesses, ratings, reviews, photos, events and its category taxonomy, plus a conversational Yelp Fusion AI search endpoint. The public side covers business search and discovery, business details, review excerpts, autocomplete, phone and address matching, and local event search. A partner tier adds reviews response, leads, advertising, reservations, waitlist, checkout and reporting.
On APIs.io we break that surface into its parts, including the Businesses API for searching, matching and retrieving business data, the Reviews API, the Categories API, the Events API and the Yelp AI API for conversational search. On the partner side there are pieces like the Leads API, the Advertising API, the Claim Business API and the Listing Management API.
What you can get done
So far we have mapped Yelp’s operations to one business capability, and it is the one most people come to Yelp for.
Reviews & Social Proof
Social proof is the evidence other customers leave behind, the star ratings and written reviews that make a stranger trust a business. For a business owner it is how you keep an eye on your own reputation without logging in every morning. For a marketer, an analyst or someone choosing suppliers, it is a way to compare what customers say about many businesses side by side, or to bring that feedback into a dashboard next to sales numbers. A business is identified by its Yelp ID or its alias, the short name that shows up in its Yelp web address, and the two calls below take either one.
GET /v3/businesses/{business_id_or_alias}/reviewsreturns review excerpts and ratings written about a business.GET /v3/businesses/{business_id_or_alias}/review_highlightsreturns the highlights Yelp pulls out of a business’s reviews, the recurring things customers mention.
Those two calls are the part of Yelp we have tied to a capability so far, but they are rarely used alone. In practice you first find the business, by searching the Businesses API by name and location or matching it on phone number and address, and then pass its ID to the review calls. The Categories API helps narrow a search to a type of business, and the Events API finds what is happening locally. If you run a business that is listed on Yelp, the partner-side Leads API is where requests from potential customers live, and the Home Services API covers jobs and quote requests.
Getting started
Yelp access is paid, and Yelp runs it as a hosted product alongside an open source project. Before you plan around it, check the Yelp pricing on APIs.io to see which plan covers the calls you need, since review data and the partner APIs are not all on the same footing. The Yelp developer documentation explains how to get an API key, which you send as a bearer token, a password-like string attached to every request, and walks through each endpoint. On APIs.io you can browse the Yelp profile, the Businesses API, the Reviews API and the Yelp AI API. Start with the one business you care about most, look it up, pull its reviews, and decide from there whether you want the same view across every business on your list.
