YelpYelpYelp is still where a lot of local reputation is made and lost, and like most review platforms it gives you no download button. Whether you run a local business, manage several as an agency, or research a market, getting Yelp reviews into a spreadsheet turns a scroll-and-forget experience into something you can actually measure. This guide covers how, and what the data is good for.
Each Yelp review holds more than a star and a paragraph:
Two of these are more useful than they first appear. The reaction counts help you weight reviews: a review other Yelpers found useful, from a named local, carries more signal than a one-line post with no engagement. And the owner responses turn the export into a record of how the business handles criticism, which for reputation work is often the most telling column of all.
Before you export, understand one thing that shapes what you can get. Yelp runs its own recommendation software that decides which reviews to surface on the main page and which to move into a separate “not currently recommended” section. This is Yelp’s doing, not the exporter’s, but it means the set of reviews visible on a page is already curated by Yelp.
A browser exporter captures what the page shows you. That is the right behaviour, it reflects what a real visitor sees, but be aware that Yelp’s filtering sits upstream of any export, and the recommended set is not the complete history of every review ever written. This is a platform reality worth stating plainly rather than pretending an export is exhaustive.
The flow, with a browser exporter:
ExportReviews’s Yelp exporter is designed for this, capturing the reactions and owner responses as their own columns. It is part of the ExportReviews portfolio; the page shows its current status.
Yelp data earns its keep in a few concrete ways, and the first pass is the same one that works everywhere: sort by rating, read the one and two-star reviews in order, and tag the recurring complaint. For a restaurant that might be wait times; for a service business, communication. Twenty minutes of tagging beats any automated score.
Beyond that, the columns start working:
For local reputation, Yelp is rarely the whole picture. Google Maps carries a different, usually larger, set of reviews for the same physical businesses, and the two together give a fuller read than either alone. The Google Maps export guide covers that platform, including its trickier relative-date handling. Pulling both and comparing the complaint themes is how you separate a real, cross-platform problem from a handful of bad days on one site.
Yelp reviews are public but personal, often naming individuals and their towns. The habits that keep you on solid ground: do not republish reviewer names, work in aggregate rather than compiling files on individual reviewers, pace your requests, and keep the export on your own device. Understanding what customers complain about is legitimate; profiling the customers themselves is not.
Yes, because Yelp reviews are public. A browser exporter reads the business page you open, the same reviews any visitor sees. This matters for local competitive research and for agencies managing multiple clients, where the reviews you need are usually not your own.
Where they exist, yes. Yelp lets a business respond to reviews, and that response plus its date can be captured into their own columns. For reputation work this is valuable, because how a business replies to criticism, and how quickly, is part of what the reviews reveal.
Typically the reviewer's name and location, the review date, the star rating and text, and the useful/funny/cool reactions the review received. The location and reaction counts help you weight reviews: a detailed, highly-reacted review from a local carries more signal than a one-line drive-by.
Yelp applies its own recommendation software that surfaces some reviews and tucks others into a separate 'not currently recommended' section. An export reflects what the page shows, so be aware that Yelp's own filtering shapes the set you can see and capture, which is a limitation of the platform rather than the tool.
Yelp shows real dates rather than the relative phrases Google Maps uses, which makes them straightforward to sort. Keep the date column and you can group reviews by month to track how a business's reputation moves over time.
Ready to export Yelp reviews?
Export the reviews of any Yelp business to CSV, Excel or JSON. Rating, text, date, reviewer name and city, and useful votes, exported locally.
See the Yelp exporter