One of the biggest websites for crowd-sourced reviews is Yelp, with more than 199 million reviews of businesses worldwide. For those who have never heard of Yelp, it is a company based in the U.S. that crowd-sources customer reviews for local businesses.

Review sites such as Yelp are essential in determining a food business’s revenue. The company started as a reviews company for restaurants and food businesses. It has recently begun to reach out to other industries, and they are now offering service to many more sectors.

When researching your competitors, it would be best if you scraped Yelp for information about local businesses. By scraping ratings and reviews, you can evaluate their popularity. From this data, it is also possible to shortlist neighborhoods with highly rated restaurants and areas with underserved restaurants.

In this post, we will discuss what Yelp is, its importance, its benefits, and the steps needed to crawl Yelp reviews so that you can easily start crawling Yelp reviews by following the tutorial we have provided.

What is Yelp Web Scraping?

Yelp Web Scraping

Yelp is a company that reviews the services and products that customers use. Customer reviews are one of the company’s basic principles, which plays a pivotal role in determining the success and growth of the business. An online review site founded by Russell Simmons in 2004 that allows users to review businesses worldwide, Yelp has grown into a multi-million dollar company.

On Yelp.com, users can recommend businesses to others. It serves the purpose of being a platform for local reviews. This will allow them to express what they think about the outlet and express their opinion. It is also possible for customers to check the website for authentic reviews. Yelp offers a combination of business aggregation and customer review capabilities that can provide the following benefits:

  • Build a list of local leads for a variety of industries
  • Find out what your competitors are doing and what they are offering
  • Identify a specific industry to research

It does not matter what Yelp data you are looking for; you can do web scraping if it is visible on the web page. Now let’s get to the point, why do you need Yelp review scraping?

Why is Yelp Rated Bad?

With so many business going after shady practices and the customers having to go anywhere Yelp may be rated as the bad boy around the block. But keep in mind that every injustice is a threat to justice. So there we have Yelp, helping business as well as customers safe-guard their interests. Businesses build their trust and reputation with good reviews and service and analysis of what their customers have to say. While customers can decide which business to work with or which restaurant to eat at and give honest reviews about them to the public. This creates a cycle of feedback, analysis an improvement including through the use of relational NPS.

Why Do You Need Yelp Review Scraping?

In today’s world, all companies could benefit from having reliable data. The main problem usually arises when one needs to know when or how to get the required data. As a result, an overwhelming amount of information on the web is sometimes not very accurate or reliable.

A company called Yelp is a famous American company that posts reviews of businesses on its website. It is a crowd-sourced system that collects reviews from people worldwide. This is the largest Internet directory.

Every second, someone leaves a review on a website. Scraping all the reviews manually is simply unrealistic. Alternatively, you will need to hire a team to handle the scraping process.

Yelp Reviews Scraping

It would be very time consuming and costly to do this. This is why you should use a web scraping service to find a more effective solution. Professional scraping companies can handle all your scraping needs professionally and by your requirements. Many websites carry valuable reviews, which you can scrape, analyze, and use. Further, you can scrape similar information from social media comments and posts.

Designing a Yelp review scraper and scraping Yelp reviews will provide you with a wealth of data trends and information. You can use that data to improve your product or convert other free clients to paid clients by showing them the results. As a group, Yelp users are divided into the following age groups:

Yelp USA users by age

Importance of Yelp Data

The Yelp.com website is one of the most reliable sources for finding information about local businesses such as restaurants, services, automotive shops, home services, etc. Using Yelp business contacts data scraping; you can collect addresses, reviews, phone numbers, and more data.

Yelp is one of the best approachable sources for finding new clients, mainly if you are targeting local businesses. The Yelp contacts data scraping method is useful for quickly collecting a great deal of information from a web page. It is worth noting that Crawlbase provides the best Yelp review data extraction and scraping services that will allow you to extract Yelp data and reviews. Yelp Data & Reviews Scraping you can trust at affordable prices.

Yelp Mobile and Web Visitors During 2016-2023

  • It is convenient and easy to access Yelp reviews via mobile phones or hand devices.
  • Users access Yelp primarily from their mobile devices. Mobile access to Yelp is rapidly replacing desktop access.
  • Approximately 50% of internet traffic in 2019 came from mobile devices.
  • Throughout 2016, 2017, and 2021, Yelp’s recommendation site saw an increasing number of unique mobile users.
  • The local search and review site used 90 million mobile app devices visitors.

Best Yelp Scrapers for 2023

An off-the-shelf Yelp review scraper tool is best if you’re not a coder or don’t want to deal with Captcha solvers, proxy management to manage different users from different locations, bans, blocks, blacklisting, user-agent management for different devices, manage website structure shifts that block effective data extraction and other issues. Even after that, you will have to face targeting the right text, and getting the HTML in suitable formatting for that. The list goes on and on. For scraping Yelp pages, you can use best Yelp Scraper.

Steps to Scrape Yelp Reviews with Crawlbase

You can scrape Yelp reviews using Crawlbase in the following steps:

  • Getting the Yelp reviews URL

As always, the first thing that we have to do is to get the URL that we want to crawl.

For this tutorial, we will be using the following restaurant reviews:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/sushi-yasaka-new-york

As you can see, here are the first reviews that appear when visiting the site as the date of today:

Yelp reviews

You also need a Crawlbase account; if you don’t have one, you can create yours for free here create one.

Once you have your account and token ready, then you can start.

We will be doing this tutorial in NodeJS but feel free to use any other language.

  • Loading Yelp reviews

To make things easy with Node, we will be using the request and cheerio open-source libraries, downloaded from here:

The request will allow us to quickly make HTTP requests in Node, while Cheerio will let us parse the HTML we get back and scrape the yelp reviews.

So we can proceed to do the following (make sure to use your account token):

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const request = require('request');

request(
  'https://api.crawlbase.com/?token=YOUR_TOKEN&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yelp.com%2Fbiz%2Fsushi-yasaka-new-york',
  (error, response, body) => {
    if (error || (response && response.statusCode !== 200)) {
      return;
    }
    console.log(body);
  },
);

We are calling the Crawlbase API to crawl Yelp without getting blocked or getting captchas.

  • Scraping Yelp reviews

Now that we have our response code, we can scrape the actual page content and extract the reviews.

We can quickly do that with Cheerio; we will need first to load the resulting HTML into Cheerio and then use css3 selectors and the same syntax used for jQuery to extract the reviews.

So our code will look something like this:

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const request = require('request');

const cheerio = require('cheerio');

request(
  'https://api.crawlbase.com/?token=YOUR_TOKEN&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yelp.com%2Fbiz%2Fsushi-yasaka-new-york',
  (error, response, body) => {
    if (error || (response && response.statusCode !== 200)) {
      return;
    }

    const $ = cheerio.load(body);
    $('.review.review--with-sidebar').each(function () {
      console.log($(this).find('.review-content p').html());
    });
  },
);

There you go! We have the yelp reviews ready to manipulate and maybe store somewhere like in MongoDB. But that is out of the scope of this tutorial.

Remember that if you aren’t using node but other programming languages like Ruby or PHP. You can easily find HTML parsing libraries to parse the results from Crawlbase API.

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and we hope to see you soon in Crawlbase. Happy crawling!

There you go! We have the yelp reviews ready to manipulate and maybe store somewhere, like in MongoDB. But that is out of the scope of this tutorial.

Remember, if you aren’t using Node but other programming languages like Ruby or PHP. You can easily find HTML parsing libraries to parse the results from Crawlbase API.

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and hope to see you soon in Crawlbase. Happy crawling!

How Can You Remove A Negative Review On Yelp?

To remove Yelp reviews, you need to know how many of them are there and a link to them. You then need to go through each one and click on the flag icon at the bottom of the review and select the reason as to why you want to be removed.

Report Yelp reviews

You need to be upfront with everything including evidence since moderators at Yelp would evaluate your request and approve depending on the scenario. In most cases, it would not be approved except for the ones violating Yelp’s privacy standards.

One thing to do if you have a number of negative reviews and you got little time to work on them is by scraping all of them and then using GPT-3 to write a response for each one of them based on scenario and then manually approving each of them. This would save you a ton of time!

Why Use Crawlbase API to Scrape Yelp Reviews?

Using Crawlbase is fast and handles proxy handling and custom headers for you. You can extract Yelp data on a large scale with Crawlbase without blocking. It takes only a few clicks for Crawlbase to create an unbroken data pipeline without any blockages.

Benefits of Scraping Yelp Reviews

People can post reviews about businesses on Yelp, an online review platform. You can save time by Yelp review extraction tool.

  • Providing Business Reviews Analysis

YELP listing gives you insight into customer satisfaction with your brand. You can also use it to determine what changes your users want to see in your brand.

  • Review Your Competitors’ Businesses

You can do competitor research by extracting competitor reviews via web scraper. By analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can better understand them.

You can learn several things about the main complaints of their users and what they appreciate the most. Aside from evaluating the quality of products, reliability, and service of competitors, this data will also provide metrics on various other business attributes.

  • Making Comparisons with Customer Reviews

The information you collect about your company and competitors becomes priceless when you collect enough review data. Examine your business’s data and compare it with your competitors.

It will give you useful insight into the future improvement of your business. Make a list of areas that need improvement. During the decision-making process, such comparisons will help and guide you. With more knowledge and accuracy, you’ll be able to make better decisions. You can also find out what makes your business superior to your competitors by looking at the negative reviews they receive.

Review of business by category

As per Yelp, you are not allowed to copy data of profiles or reviews off Yelp either manually or through some kind of automation via bots, or tools like browser extensions, software, etc. If you are found doing that which Yelp states as exploiting by yourself or through any third-party as per Yelp’s terms of services.

Yelp.com scraping at a slow, respectful rate is ethical scraping. Yelp hosts only public data and does not collect any personal or private information. When scrape for Yelp review data gathering, we should avoid collecting personal information from GDPR-protected countries or seek legal advice.

To scrape Yelp, you need a reliable scraper that does not give you error when you are in production. Most scrapers built are either too bookish or not maintained because they are not in production. This is what will stop you from scraping Yelp smoothly. But don’t worry, we are here to discuss things in detail.

Final Thoughts

Scraping of the web to assemble business-related data has become one of the most widespread parts of business research, and Yelp is not an exception to this rule. Even though Yelp does not provide a platform that allows scraping, you can use to scrape Yelp, and we have mentioned some of the best ones above.

Crawlbase is the most powerful web scraping tool, and it is our recommendation to anyone who wishes to take advantage of web data to the fullest extent. Gone are the days when web scraping was strictly for programmers. All Crawlbase does is bring you the smoothest and most reliable scraping experience.