HasData Yelp README
The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the HasData Yelp listing page.
Yelp MCP Server
A hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives Claude, Cursor, Windsurf and any other MCP client three read-only Yelp tools. Search businesses by keyword and location, read one business in full, and page through its complete review feed, all as structured JSON, with no Yelp Fusion key and nothing to host.
It reads public Yelp pages that a signed-out visitor can see, on any of the 41 regional domains.
1,000 free credits every month, no card required, which is 100 Yelp calls at the 10-credit rate.
Contents
- What you need
- Quick start
- Example prompts
- Tools
- Errors and failure paths
- Pricing, free tier and limits
- Tool selection
- How it compares
- FAQ
- HasData links
- Development
- Contributing
- License
What you need
An MCP client and a HasData API key from the dashboard, free to create with no card, and the free tier covers about 100 calls a month at the 10-credit rate. This is a remote server, so the simplest path is a URL and an x-api-key header, with no container to run. A client that only speaks stdio reaches it through a thin launcher, published as @hasdata/yelp-mcp on npm and hasdata-yelp-mcp on PyPI, shown below.
Quick start
The server URL is the same for every client. We run it hands-on in Claude Code and Claude Desktop. The other blocks follow each client's own documented format for a remote server.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| URL | https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=yelp |
| Transport | HTTP, streamable |
| Auth header | x-api-key: HASDATA_API_KEY |
Clients with OAuth support can add the same URL as a connector and sign in without putting a key in a config file.
Claude Code
Claude Desktop
Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector, then paste https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=yelp and sign in.
For the config-file route, Claude Desktop loads only local (stdio) servers, so it reaches a remote server through a stdio launcher. The @hasdata/yelp-mcp package is that launcher, and it reads the key from the environment. Add this to claude_desktop_config.json:
For Python instead of Node, swap the launcher for the PyPI package, which uvx runs without a manual install:
Cursor
~/.cursor/mcp.json for every project, or .cursor/mcp.json for one:
Windsurf
~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json. Windsurf calls the field serverUrl, not url:
VS Code
.vscode/mcp.json in the workspace:
Example prompts
Each of these lands on one tool, or on two in sequence when the second needs an identifier the first returns.
- Find coffee roasteries in Austin, TX and rank them by rating against review count.
- Pull the hours, phone and website for the Yelp business
desnudo-coffee-austin. - Read every one-star and two-star review of this business and group the complaints by theme.
- Which dishes does Yelp list as popular for this place, and what do reviewers say about them?
- Compare the rating distribution of these three competitors in the same neighborhood.
- Show me the reviews Yelp does not recommend for this business and how they differ from the recommended ones.
A prompt that names a business rather than a Yelp ID takes two calls, one search to resolve the ID and one place or reviews lookup to read it. The search tool returns both placeId and placeAlias, and either one works as the placeId argument to the place tool.
Tools
| Tool | What it returns |
|---|---|
hasdata_yelp_place_getPlaceDetails | Name, address, phone, website, price range, categories, overall rating, review count, hours, amenities, photos, and highlighted reviews. 10 credits a call |
hasdata_yelp_reviews_getPlaceReviews | Fetches the review feed of a single Yelp business by Yelp ID, with sorting (relevance, date, rating, elites), filtering by star rating, language and free-text query, and…. 10 credits a call |
hasdata_yelp_search_getSearchResults | A ranked list of businesses with Yelp alias/ID, name, categories, rating, review count, price tier, neighborhood, and thumbnail. 10 credits a call |
Three tools, 10 credits per successful call. Every tool accepts domain to switch country, one of 41 values, from www.yelp.com through the European, Asian and Latin American sites, including the language-specific variants such as fr.yelp.ca and zh.yelp.com.hk.
Get Yelp search results
hasdata_yelp_search_getSearchResults
A page of businesses for a keyword in a place.
| Parameter | Type | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
keyword | string | yes | What to search for, such as coffee |
location | string | yes | Where to search, such as Austin, TX |
l | string | Map bounding box instead of a radius, as g:lon1,lat1,lon2,lat2 | |
domain | string | Yelp site, defaults to www.yelp.com | |
start | number | Result offset, stepping by 10 |
Returns searchInformation with the echoed keyword, location and totalResults, an ads array of paid placements, an organicResults array, and pagination with currentPage, perPage, totalPages, nextPageUrl and otherPagesUrls.
The two result arrays are not the same shape. An organic result carries position and streetAddress, while an ad carries neither and adds phone and a highlights array of the badges Yelp shows advertisers. Merging the arrays without checking which one a business came from turns paid placement into rank.
Get Yelp place details
hasdata_yelp_place_getPlaceDetails
One business in full.
| Parameter | Type | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
placeId | string | yes | A Yelp ID such as oiJ7QuhhpsEpe9zFTZF0bA, or an alias such as desnudo-coffee-austin |
domain | string | Yelp site, defaults to www.yelp.com |
Returns a placeResult object with name, url, address, neighborhoods, country, phone, website, price, categories, rating, reviews, isClaimed and isClaimable, an operationHours object holding a week of hours plus today, a features array, a menu object with popularDishes, a faqs array of questions Yelp readers asked and answered, a reviewHighlights array of the phrases Yelp pins to the top of the page, an images array, and businessMap, a static map image URL.
features is the amenities block, and each entry carries a title and an isActive flag, so a false entry is Yelp stating the amenity is absent rather than unknown. That difference matters when you filter, because dropping the false entries and dropping the missing ones are not the same query.
Get Yelp place reviews
hasdata_yelp_reviews_getPlaceReviews
The review feed of one business, in full text, with sorting, filtering and pagination.
| Parameter | Type | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
placeId | string | yes | The Yelp ID of the business |
domain | string | Yelp site, defaults to www.yelp.com | |
sortBy | string | relevanceDesc (default), dateDesc, dateAsc, ratingDesc, ratingAsc or elitesDesc | |
rating | string | Keep only these star ratings, such as 5 or 1,2 | |
query | string | Free-text search inside the reviews | |
languageCode | string | Two-letter language of the reviews, defaults to en | |
notRecommended | boolean | Return the feed Yelp filters out instead of the recommended one | |
start | number | Offset, stepping by num | |
num | number | Page size, 49 at most, and 49 by default | |
nextPageToken | string | Cursor taken verbatim from the previous response |
Returns searchInformation with the business name, alias, URL, totalResults, rating, a reviewCountsByRating array and a reviewCountsByLanguage breakdown, a pagination object, and a reviews array.
Each review carries position, id, link, a user object, a comment object holding text and its detected language, date, rating, and, when the reviewer attached them, photos, videos and reactions. The user object reports name, userId, address, lifetime reviews, friends and photos counts, and eliteYear for a Yelp Elite member.
A review the author later rewrote also carries previousReviews, holding the earlier version with its own text, rating and date. That is the field to read when the question is whether a rating moved, because the current review alone cannot answer it.
Errors and failure paths
Plan for these rather than assuming a happy path.
A search with no matches returns a successful result with an empty organicResults array, not an error. requestMetadata.status is still ok. Test the array length before iterating.
snippet is marked-up text, not clean text. Yelp wraps the matched words in [[HIGHLIGHT]] and [[ENDHIGHLIGHT]], and those markers arrive verbatim. Strip them before you index, embed or display the snippet.
Category URLs arrive HTML-escaped. The url inside a categories entry contains & rather than a bare ampersand, because that is how it sits in the page. Unescape it before following the link.
rating and query do not combine on the reviews tool. Yelp ignores the star filter while a free-text query is running, so a filtered search comes back with reviews of every rating. Filter the result yourself when you need both.
start and nextPageToken are two different ways to page, and they do not mix. Pass one or the other. The token carries both the offset and the page size, so resending it alone continues the feed, while start needs num to stay put across calls.
The not-recommended feed is a different feed with different limits. Setting notRecommended returns reviews Yelp filtered out of the main list, and those come ten at a time rather than 49, with no photos, videos or reactions attached.
A business can be unclaimed, and an unclaimed page is thin. isClaimed false usually means no website, no hours and no amenities, because nobody filled them in. Read the flag before you treat a missing field as a scraping failure.
Results that carry data also carry a requestMetadata.id worth quoting in support.
Pricing, free tier and limits
Each Yelp tool costs 10 credits per successful call. Response size does not change the price, so a 49-review page and a 5-review page cost the same, which makes the largest page the cheapest way to read a feed.
The free tier is 1,000 credits every month with no card, which is 100 Yelp calls at the base rate. It renews with the billing cycle, so a low-volume agent runs on the free tier indefinitely.
Paid plans start at $59 a month for 200,000 credits, which is 20,000 calls. The unit price falls with volume, from $2.95 per 1,000 calls on the entry plan to $1.19 on Basic and $0.83 across the Growth tiers. Current figures live on the pricing page.
Your plan also sets concurrency. The free tier allows 1 request at a time, Startup 5, Basic 15, and the Growth tiers run from 50 to 500. Retry on the 429 with a backoff in anything unattended, because an agent that fans out across a list of businesses will reach the ceiling before you do.
A request that comes back non-200 is not billed. A successful call that finds nothing is still a call.
Tool selection
Start from what the prompt gives you. A keyword and a place go to the search tool, a Yelp ID or alias goes straight to the place tool, and a question about what customers said goes to the reviews tool. Spending a search call to reach an ID you already have is the most common waste.
Then pick by what the question is about. The place tool answers questions about the business itself, its hours, amenities, price tier and headline rating. The reviews tool answers questions about its customers, and it is the only one that returns review text, authors and the rating distribution. The reviewHighlights block on the place tool is a sample Yelp curates, not a substitute for the feed.
Read the feed with the largest page. num defaults to its maximum of 49 already, so leave it alone unless you are deliberately sampling.
How it compares
Yelp's own Fusion API is the official route to this data, and it is a different instrument.
| Yelp Fusion API | This server | |
|---|---|---|
| Eligibility | An approved developer app | An API key |
| Review text | Up to three per business, truncated | The full feed, full text, paged |
| Review authors | Name and photo | Name, location, lifetime counts, Elite year |
| Rating distribution | Not returned | reviewCountsByRating on every call |
| Filtered reviews | Not returned | The not-recommended feed |
| Edit history | Not returned | previousReviews when a review was rewritten |
| Amenities and hours | A limited attribute set | The amenities block as the page shows it |
The row that decides it is review text. Fusion returns three excerpts per business, which answers a display question on a storefront and cannot answer an analysis question about sentiment, complaints or how a rating moved. When three excerpts and an official contract are what you need, Fusion is the better fit.
FAQ
Is there an official Yelp MCP server?
Yelp does not publish one. This one is maintained by HasData and reads public Yelp pages.
What is a Yelp MCP server?
An MCP server exposes tools an AI client can call. This one turns Yelp search results, business pages and review feeds into JSON an agent can reason over, without a browser or a scraping library in your stack.
Do I need a Yelp account or a Fusion key?
No. The only credential is your HasData key.
Which Yelp sites are covered?
All 41 domains the API accepts, from www.yelp.com through the European, Asian and Latin American sites. Several countries have more than one, split by language, such as fr.yelp.ca next to www.yelp.ca. Pass domain to switch.
Can I get every review of a business?
Yes, by paging. The feed returns 49 at a time, and pagination.hasNextPage tells you when to stop. Reading a business with 347 reviews takes eight calls.
What is the difference between recommended and not-recommended reviews?
Yelp runs software that hides some reviews from the main feed. The default response is the recommended feed, the one a visitor sees. Setting notRecommended returns the hidden one instead, which is smaller, paged ten at a time, and stripped of photos and reactions.
Why did my rating filter return every rating?
Because a query was set at the same time. Yelp drops the star filter when it runs a text search, so the two cannot be combined server-side.
Can I use this together with other HasData APIs?
Yes. One key covers everything, and one endpoint serves them all through the apis parameter. Point a client at ?apis=yelp,google_maps to get both tool sets in one connection, or at mcp.hasdata.com/api/mcp for the full catalogue.
Is HasData affiliated with Yelp?
No. HasData is an independent service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Yelp. Yelp is a trademark of its respective owner. The tools work with publicly available data only, and you are responsible for using the results in line with Yelp's terms and the law that applies to you.
Compliance and personal data
The review tools return personal data. A review carries the author's display name, profile photo, stated location, user ID and a link to their profile, and reviewers are private individuals rather than businesses. That puts the response in scope of the GDPR and the CCPA in a way a business listing is not. Decide what you need before you store it, keep it no longer than the purpose requires, and check your own obligations. Aggregate analysis rarely needs the author fields at all.
HasData links
- Yelp Scraper API, the REST endpoints behind these tools
- API documentation
- MCP server documentation
- Pricing
- Dashboard
Other HasData MCP servers: Google Search, Google Maps, Google Trends, Google Flights, DuckDuckGo, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Amazon, Zillow, Airbnb, Booking.com, Indeed.
Development
The launcher is a thin stdio bridge to the remote server, so there is nothing to build.
The tests in test/ assert the tool contract, the part that can break without a commit here. They check that ?apis=yelp returns the expected tool count, that no name changed, that every tool still declares its required parameters and carries a description, and that the key in use is actually accepted. That last check calls a tool for real and costs 10 credits, which is the price of a canary that can fail for the right reason.
The contract suite also runs weekly on a schedule, because the upstream tool list can change without anyone touching this repository.
Contributing
A tool table, a response sample or a documented behaviour that does not match reality is worth an issue. There is a template for exactly that. Pull requests are welcome for the same, and for anything in the launcher.
License
MIT, see LICENSE.