If you sell to local businesses, Yelp is one of the best prospect databases that exists: ranked listings, review counts that signal how established a business is, price tiers, phone numbers, and neighborhoods. Getting that out of the site programmatically is the annoying part. The Yelp Search API on Apify does it for you: a search term and a location go in, and the ranked business listings come out as clean JSON.

It returns one row per business with name, rating, review count, price tier, categories, phone, neighborhood, and the place IDs you need to pull full details later. Each result also carries a filters object listing the valid category, price, feature, and neighborhood refinements for that search, so you can discover legal filter values straight from the data. This makes it a practical base for local lead generation: build B2B lists by trade and metro, attach ratings and review counts to every prospect, or take a ranked snapshot of a local market.

Example Tasks and Use Cases

Find dentists by ZIP code for B2B lead lists - ZIP-level targeting, the granularity most sales territories are drawn in.

Find dentists in Brooklyn for lead generation - the metro version of the same play, ready to clone for your own city and niche.

Find plumbers in Chicago for lead generation - the pattern applied to home services, where review count doubles as a longevity signal.

Find the best restaurants in Newark - rating sort for a market snapshot rather than a lead list.

Find the best restaurants in Oakland - the same search pointed at another coast: one saved task per market, run on demand.

Works with MCP

Through Apify's MCP server, the Actor is callable from Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor as a tool. Ask "find the ten highest-rated plumbers in Chicago and give me their phone numbers" and the agent runs a real search instead of inventing plausible-sounding businesses. Setup is a one-time config.

Pricing is pay per page: about one cent per results page (roughly 10 businesses) plus a one-cent setup fee, so a 100-listing pull costs about eleven cents. No subscription and no daily quota. New Apify accounts ship with free platform credit that covers early runs.

A note on limits: the search results page does not show email addresses, full review text, or hours, so the Actor does not return those. It returns place IDs precisely so you can chain the Yelp Place API for full detail and the Yelp Reviews API for the review text. The Google Local API gives you the same market from Google's side for comparison.

Keywords and Topics

yelp scraper, yelp search api, local lead generation, yelp mcp, business listings scraper, local business data, b2b lead lists, yelp data export, restaurant data api.