# Yelp API and Tripadvisor API: local businesses by keyword

Ask for a kind of business and a place, and get the listings back as data: names, ratings, review counts, addresses and categories. Two sources through one treg.to key, from $0.00075 a call, with no Yelp or Tripadvisor developer programme to be admitted to first. They are different listings rather than two copies of one, so the comparison below groups them rather than ranking them against each other.

## What's the best way to ask ChatGPT?

Setup line (paste into any agent): `set up treg — https://treg.to/llms.txt`

Then ask: "Using treg, find ramen restaurants in Austin, Texas on Yelp and on Tripadvisor. Show me the price first, then give me one list with each place's name, rating, review count and address."

- **Give the thing and the place separately** Both sources take a description and a location as two fields. One blob of text resolves badly.
- **Name the city and the state** The commonest empty result on this job is a location string neither source recognises.
- **Say which source you want** Yelp and Tripadvisor hold different businesses. Ask for both and you get both, side by side.
- **Ask for the price first** treg.to returns the cost before the call, so the agent can say what it will spend.

## Why go through treg.to

- **One key, not 9 accounts** treg.to holds the provider keys. Neither you nor the agent sees them.
- **Price before the call** The provider's own rate, $0.000 markup, from a prepaid balance.
- **No subscription, no seats** Charged per call. $1.00 free per new team, no card to start.
- **Your own keys are free** Already pay Hunter? Register it and those calls are never metered.
- **Switch by changing a word** Another provider is a different word in the prompt, not a new integration.
- **Nothing to integrate** No SDK, no OAuth dance per vendor, no seats.

## Behind the scenes: what ChatGPT sees before it calls

treg.to does not choose for you. It hands ChatGPT this comparison and it picks, or you tell it how.

### What does each source cost?

- Cheapest per call: DataForSEO at $0.00075 (`dataforseo.x.business-data-tripadvisor-search-task-post`)
- Cheapest per found: SerpApi at $0.015 (`serpapi.x.yelp-search`)

Those units are not interchangeable: one call can return many results, so compare on the unit you will actually be billed in.

### Which is the most reliable?

- SerpApi: 100% over 15 calls, 2.5s median

Measured on treg.to traffic; not a controlled benchmark.

### How do the two sources compare?

#### Tripadvisor

| Provider | Price | Accepts | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| DataForSEO | $0.00075 per call | keyword, location_name, location_code, priority, depth, tag | 2026-07-28 |

#### Yelp

| Provider | Price | Accepts | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | $0.015 per found | engine, find_loc, find_desc | 2026-07-28 |

Endpoints:

- `serpapi.x.yelp-search`: treg call serpapi.x.yelp-search --query engine=yelp --query find_loc=New York, NY, USA --query find_desc=Coffee
- `dataforseo.x.business-data-tripadvisor-search-task-post`: treg call dataforseo.x.business-data-tripadvisor-search-task-post --data '[{"keyword":"pizza","location_code":1003854,"depth":30}]'

## What people actually struggle with

From roughly 200 Reddit and X posts read in August 2026, with eleven vendor items excluded, among them three accounts seeding the same Google Maps scraper across three subreddits with the same story about a family member's small business. One finding is worth stating before the quotes: nobody in the organic posts says Yelp has closed its API programme, so this page does not say it either. The pain people actually report is different and more mundane.

**It works in Postman and dies in the application**

> "my call is successful in postman but I'm experiencing this error when making the call locally from the app" (r/Angular2, 2 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/Angular2/comments/7ns9gv/experiencing_403_when_making_get_call_to_yelp_api/)

What this page can do about it: This shape recurred six times in the research and it is the one theme this page can honestly own. The key is fine and the request is fine; what is wrong is where the call came from, usually a browser preflight or a key that ended up inside a front end bundle. A call through treg.to leaves a server with the credential injected there, so that class of failure stops existing. It will not rescue you from a parameter the source rejects.

**A thousand results is the ceiling, and no proxy raises it**

> "don't expect to pull more than 1,000 results as the Yelp Fusion API has a hard limitation in that regard" (r/learnpython, 7 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/92hcf7/how_to_loop_api_call_requests_yelp_fusion/)

What this page can do about it: No good answer, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. A ceiling on a source is a property of the source; buying the call from someone else does not lift it. The only thing that actually works is fanning the question out, splitting a metro into its suburbs and a trade into its categories, and paying per call for each slice. That is a loop your agent can run and it is why the per call price matters more than it looks.

**Nobody reads the content rights until something makes them**

> "I got to the Content rights part and hadn't looked into what rights I actually need for that information." (r/webdev, 3 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1jekz4a/yelp_fusion_api_as_third_party_info_rights/)

What this page can do about it: Also no good answer, and the place where a page like this is most tempted to be vague. Having a credential injected for you changes who holds a key. It does not change who is bound by the source's terms, which is still you, and a listing you pull here is still Yelp's or Tripadvisor's content. If the plan is to republish it, that is a question for their terms and not for a price table.

**Tripadvisor will not let you build on localhost**

> "But problem is tripadvisor api does not allow to type localhost:3000." (r/node, 5 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/14hvtrp/how_do_i_allow_localhost3000_whem_i_am_using/)

What this page can do about it: A narrow but real win. Tripadvisor's own programme issues keys tied to a domain, which is exactly the thing a laptop does not have, and the thread underneath is people inventing workarounds for it. The row here does not use that key at all, so there is nothing to restrict and nothing to register before you can try it from your own machine.

**Most people already left for Google Maps, and it stops at the front desk**

> "The issue I’m running into is that most tools (Google Maps, etc.) only give me the public front-desk phone number." (r/ClaudeCowork, 8 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCowork/comments/1uxezdz/what_are_you_using_to_scrape_local_business/)

What this page can do about it: The loudest theme in the whole research, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a deflection. If Google Maps is the source you want, this page is not it: treg.to has no Places keyword search on the menu today, and the Google rows it does have for local are for a Business Profile you already own. On the second half, no listings source anywhere carries the owner's address, because the listing does not have one. Getting past the front desk is a second step against the business's own site, and it is the step with a hard floor.


## What actually differs

- The two rows work differently, and one of them is not a single round trip. SerpApi reads Yelp's own results page from a description and a location and answers immediately. DataForSEO posts an asynchronous task against Tripadvisor which you collect afterwards, so that side is two calls with a wait in between. Tell the agent to expect it rather than to treat the empty first response as a failure.
- Location is where this job fails quietly rather than loudly. DataForSEO takes a location name or a numeric location code and will return a perfectly valid answer for the wrong market if the code is not the one you meant. SerpApi takes free text, which is forgiving until two places share a name. Give both the city and the state and check the first result's address before you loop over three hundred queries.
- Neither row makes you a Yelp or Tripadvisor developer, and neither changes whose content it is. There is no Fusion key to be approved for and no domain restricted Tripadvisor key to register, which removes the step people in the research got stuck on. What does not move is the licence: the listings belong to Yelp and to Tripadvisor, and their terms bind whoever republishes them, credential injection or not.

## What does a local business search return?

A page of listings for one kind of business in one place, as data: the name, the rating and how many reviews it is averaged over, the address, the categories the source files it under, and its own page on that source. It is a directory lookup, not a lead list. Nothing here is scored, deduplicated across sources or checked against a company register, and the two sources will disagree about which businesses exist because they hold different directories.

## Questions

**How much does one local business search cost?** The provider's own rate with $0.000 added by treg.to, from a prepaid balance rather than a plan. The two sources are priced differently and are billed in different units, so the comparison above gives each one separately rather than a single headline number.

**Is this the Yelp Fusion API?** No. The Yelp row reads Yelp's public results page for a description and a location, so there is no Fusion key, no application and no approval to wait for. It also means you get what the results page shows rather than the Fusion field set, and that Yelp's terms still govern what you may do with the listings.

**Can I search Google Maps or Google Business Profile this way?** Not from this page. treg.to has no Google Places keyword search in the catalog today, and the Google rows it does carry for local businesses read a Business Profile you already own, on your own connected account. If Maps is the source you need, this job cannot serve it and saying so is more useful than a near miss.

**Will I get the owner's email address?** No, and no listings source will. A directory entry carries the business's public contact details, which in practice means the front desk. Going further means visiting each business's own site and verifying what you find there, which is a separate job with its own failure rate rather than a field you can ask for here.

HTML version: https://treg.to/use-cases/find-local-businesses-by-keyword-and-location