Yelp Fusion API
Provides access to Yelp's database of local businesses including search by location/category/keyword, business details (hours, photos, attributes), user reviews, and autocomplete. Covers 50+ million businesses across 35+ countries.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
API key has no scopes — one key grants full read access to all endpoints. No IP allowlisting available on free tier. Treat key as broadly privileged.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You need rich local business data including reviews and hours for consumer-facing apps or AI agents helping users find places to eat, shop, or get services.
Avoid When
You need to modify Yelp data, require real-time availability/booking, or need global coverage outside Yelp's supported countries. Also avoid if you need more than 500 calls/day without a paid arrangement.
Use Cases
- • Find restaurants, shops, or services near a location with ratings and hours
- • Build local business recommendation features in consumer apps
- • Retrieve business hours and contact info for customer-facing agents
- • Display user reviews and ratings for businesses in search results
- • Autocomplete business name searches for better UX
Not For
- • Writing or posting reviews via the API (read-only review access)
- • High-volume bulk data extraction or scraping business databases
- • Real-time reservation or booking functionality
Interface
Authentication
Bearer token passed as Authorization header. Single API key per app. No OAuth or user-level auth for basic business data access.
Pricing
Free tier is generous for most agent use cases. Rate limits are enforced at the app level, not per endpoint.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ GraphQL and REST endpoints have different capabilities; GraphQL supports more fields but is less documented for agents
- ⚠ Business hours returned as complex nested structure requiring careful parsing for day/open/close times
- ⚠ Search results capped at 1,000 total (offset + limit <= 1000); agents must handle this ceiling
- ⚠ Phone number search requires exact E.164 format; imprecise formats silently return no results
- ⚠ Review text is truncated to 160 characters in list responses; full text requires a separate business detail call
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Comprehensive deep-dive: security analysis, reliability audit, agent experience review, cost modeling, competitive positioning, and improvement roadmap for Yelp Fusion API.
AI-powered analysis · PDF + markdown · Delivered within 30 minutes
Package Brief
Quick verdict, integration guide, cost projections, gotchas with workarounds, and alternatives comparison.
Delivered within 10 minutes
Score Monitoring
Get alerted when this package's AF, security, or reliability scores change significantly. Stay ahead of regressions.
Continuous monitoring
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.