Updated Oct 2026

Yelp API for reviews: what you get, what it costs, and how to read your own Yelp reviews

The Yelp API (Yelp Fusion, now documented as the Yelp Places API) returns up to three review excerpts per business, not full reviews, and the reviews endpoint needs a paid Enhanced or Premium plan. Premium raises the cap to seven excerpts. There’s no reply endpoint. If what you need is every review of your own Yelp listings in your code, Prisma’s Yelp connector (beta) reads the full public reviews of the listings you add and returns them in the same JSON as Google and Trustpilot.

Get API key

Yelp is included from the Beam plan. Google, App Store, Google Play, Judge.me and Trustpilot are free for 2 locations.

How the official Yelp API works for reviews

Yelp’s API is built for apps that display Yelp content: search for businesses, show their details, and show a taste of their reviews with a link back to Yelp.

The reviews endpoint

GET https://api.yelp.com/v3/businesses/{business_id_or_alias}/reviews (reference)

• Returns up to three review excerpts for the business (seven on Premium), and requires the Enhanced or Premium plan.
• Optional locale (for example en_US) and sort_by, which only accepts yelp_sort.
• The reference also lists limit (0–50) and offset (0–1000), but the same page says the endpoint returns up to three excerpts. Expect three. More detail in our guide to the Yelp API review limit.
• You need a business ID or alias first, from the search, phone search, transaction search or autocomplete endpoints.
• Businesses with no reviews aren’t returned.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YELP_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.yelp.com/v3/businesses/BUSINESS_ID_OR_ALIAS/reviews?locale=en_US"

Getting a Yelp API key

1. Choose a Yelp Places API plan from the Yelp for Business product page.
2. Create an app on the Yelp developer site and describe what it does.
3. Accept the API Terms of Use and the Display Requirements.
4. Yelp issues your private API key.

Send it on every request as Authorization: Bearer <API_KEY> (authentication). If it leaks, refresh it from the Manage App page.

Yelp API pricing and plans

Yelp’s Places API page lists three plans:

Each plan has a 30-day trial with 5,000 free calls, and Yelp bills a minimum of 1,000 calls a day.

Rate limits

When you hit the daily cap, Yelp returns HTTP 429 with ACCESS_LIMIT_REACHED; the window resets at midnight UTC. Too many requests per second returns 429 with TOO_MANY_REQUESTS_PER_SECOND. Every response carries RateLimit-DailyLimit, RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-ResetTime headers. Yelp grants higher limits based on real user traffic, usually after launch (rate limiting).

What the Yelp API doesn’t tell you

• Three excerpts is a display feature, not a data feed. You can show a teaser on a listing page. You can’t run sentiment analysis, alerting or reporting on three short snippets (Yelp’s FAQ says excerpts are the first 160 characters).
• Reviews cost extra. The endpoint you actually came for sits behind Enhanced or Premium. The Base plan won’t let you prove the use case.
• There’s no reply endpoint. The Places API reads public content. Replying to reviews on your own Yelp page happens in Yelp for Business.
• Display Requirements apply. You accept them to get a key. Plan your UI around Yelp’s attribution rules before you build.
• Caching is limited. Yelp’s rate-limiting page suggests caching data for up to 24 hours during development.
• It’s business-agnostic. The API reads any business, which is good for discovery apps and no help as proof of ownership. If you run 40 locations, nothing in the Yelp API knows they’re yours.

Read your Yelp reviews with Prisma

Prisma is a unified reviews API for the businesses and apps you own or manage. Yelp support is in beta. You add the public URL of each Yelp listing you own; no Yelp login is shared with Prisma. Prisma reads the full public reviews of that listing through a data provider, with the owner’s public reply, and checks for new ones on a schedule set by your plan. Details on the Yelp reviews API page.

1. Connect a Yelp listing

curl -X POST https://api.prismareviews.com/v1/connections \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PRISMA_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"platform": "yelp", "listing_url": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/your-business-san-francisco"}'

2. Read the reviews

curl "https://api.prismareviews.com/v1/reviews?platform=yelp&location_id=loc_123&since=2026-10-01" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PRISMA_API_KEY"

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "rev_3k9d",
      "platform": "yelp",
      "location_id": "loc_123",
      "rating": 3,
      "text": "Great tacos, but we waited 40 minutes for a table on a Tuesday.",
      "author": "Mike R.",
      "created_at": "2026-10-12T19:40:00Z",
      "reply": null,
      "url": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/..."
    }
  ],
  "next_cursor": null
}

3. Answer from the review link

Every review includes url, the link to answer it on Yelp. Yelp has no public reply API, so Prisma is read only here: it doesn’t publish replies on Yelp. The owner answers in Yelp for Business. If your code calls the reply endpoint for a Yelp review anyway, Prisma returns 422:

curl -X POST https://api.prismareviews.com/v1/reviews/rev_3k9d/reply   -H "Authorization: Bearer $PRISMA_API_KEY"   -H "Content-Type: application/json"   -d '{"text": "Thanks for the feedback."}'

{
  "error": {
    "code": "reply_not_supported",
    "message": "Yelp has no reply API for third parties, so Prisma only reads its reviews. Answer this one on the platform: https://www.yelp.com/biz/...",
    "platform": "yelp",
    "url": "https://www.yelp.com/biz/..."
  }
}

Subscribe to the review.created webhook to hear about new reviews without polling.

Official Yelp API vs Prisma

Need Tripadvisor too? See the Tripadvisor API. Most multi-location brands get the majority of their reviews on Google, which is free for your first 2 locations: start with the Google reviews API, compare it with the Trustpilot API, and see Prisma for multi-location brands and all integrations.

FAQ

How many reviews does the Yelp API return?

The reviews endpoint returns up to three review excerpts per business on the Enhanced plan and up to seven on Premium, not the full review text.

Is the Yelp API free?

No. Yelp lists the Base plan at $229 a month, Enhanced at $299 and Premium at $643, each with a 30-day trial. The reviews endpoint requires the Enhanced or Premium plan.

How do I get a Yelp API key?

Choose a Yelp Places API plan, create an app on the Yelp developer site, accept the Terms of Use and Display Requirements, and Yelp issues your key. Send it as Authorization: Bearer <key>.

Is Yelp Fusion the same as the Yelp Places API?

Yes. Yelp’s current documentation describes the business and reviews endpoints as the Yelp Places API, while many URLs and developers still call it Fusion.

Does Prisma support Yelp?

Yes, in beta, from the Beam plan. Prisma reads the full public reviews of the Yelp listings you add. Yelp has no reply API for third parties, so Prisma is read only there: each review includes a link to answer it in Yelp for Business.