How to Scrape and Analyze Yelp Reviews
8 mins read - Created on Apr 13, 2026On Yelp, customer feedback focuses heavily on service experience — from staff behavior and wait times to pricing, ambiance, and overall satisfaction. Reviews often reflect real-world interactions, making Yelp a valuable source for understanding how businesses are perceived at the point of experience.
Unlike product-focused platforms, Yelp reviews are tied to locations and service quality. When analyzed collectively, they reveal recurring operational issues, strengths, and patterns in customer expectations across different businesses or locations.
With Kimola, you can collect and analyze Yelp reviews through a structured workflow. By gathering reviews and organizing them into datasets, the platform enables you to transform experience-driven feedback into actionable insights.
Start by signing in to your Kimola account or creating a free account if you don’t have one yet.
Manually Scrape Yelp Reviews
Manual scraping allows you to collect Yelp reviews directly while browsing business pages using Kimola’s browser extension. Instead of starting the process from within the platform, this workflow lets you capture reviews in real time and store them as a dataset for later analysis.
Before you begin, make sure the browser extension is installed and properly set up on your browser. You should also be logged in to your Kimola account and have your API Key connected. If the setup is not complete, follow the browser extension setup guide before continuing.
Collected reviews are stored as datasets in your Kimola account. This makes them especially useful when working on larger research projects or when collecting feedback across multiple locations or businesses over time. Instead of analyzing data immediately, you can first gather and organize your dataset, then decide when to create a report and run the analysis.
Collecting data through the browser extension does not use queries from your plan. This means you can gather Yelp reviews freely, even on the free plan, without worrying about query limits.
Step 1: Open the Yelp Business Page
Go to Yelp and navigate to the business you want to analyze. Since the browser extension collects only the reviews that are currently visible in your browser, make sure the reviews section is fully loaded.
Scroll down to the reviews section and, if available, open the full list of reviews to access more entries. Loading additional reviews on the page will allow you to collect a larger dataset during the scraping process.
You can pin the browser extension next to your address bar for quick access. While browsing, the extension may display a small badge indicating how much review content is available on the page.
Step 2: Start Scraping Yelp Reviews
Once you are on the Yelp business page, the browser extension icon in your toolbar may display a small badge indicating the number of reviews currently detected on the page. This icon is typically located in the top-right corner of your browser. If no badge appears, make sure the reviews section is visible and properly loaded.
Click the extension icon to open it. The business name is displayed for confirmation before data collection begins. Then, click the Generate button to start capturing the reviews currently visible on the page.
During the scraping process, the extension may scroll or load additional reviews to collect more data. To avoid interruptions, keep the browser tab active and do not close or refresh the page until the process is complete.
Step 3: Complete the Scraping
During scraping, the browser extension continues collecting reviews by loading additional entries and navigating through available review pages where possible. This allows it to capture a larger portion of the available feedback without requiring manual navigation.
If needed, you can stop the process at any time using the controls in the extension. Otherwise, the collection will continue until all accessible reviews have been captured.
Once the process is complete — whether stopped manually or finished automatically — a dataset is created and displayed in the extension alongside your most recent datasets. If you are logged in to your Kimola account, you can open the dataset directly from the extension or access it from the dashboard to review, manage, or analyze the data by creating a report.
The browser extension attempts to collect the maximum amount of available review data, but platform-specific limitations may apply. Loading more reviews on the page can help increase the size of the collected dataset.
Step 4: Create a Report from the Airset
To analyze the Yelp reviews you have collected, open the Kimola dashboard and navigate to the Datasets section from the left-hand menu. Here, you can view the full list of datasets created during your scraping sessions.
Locate the dataset you want to analyze and click Create Report.
This action initiates Kimola’s standard report creation workflow. Select the column that contains the primary review text, and optionally include additional fields such as date or URL if they are available. These selections define how your dataset will be structured and processed during the analysis.
Analyze Yelp Reviews
Whether Yelp reviews are collected across different business pages or locations, they can be systematically analyzed to identify recurring themes, sentiment patterns, service-related pain points, and underlying customer expectations. This process transforms unstructured review text into structured insights that can support service improvement, customer experience optimization, and broader business decisions.
Kimola uses a unified report generation workflow that applies across all data collection scenarios. In the previous steps, this workflow was initiated by collecting Yelp reviews through manual scraping. In the following steps, the focus shifts to configuring the analysis to ensure that the resulting report aligns with your specific research objectives and use cases.
Choose Dimensions
To deepen your analysis, you can apply additional dimensions that organize Yelp reviews into more meaningful layers. These dimensions help structure feedback beyond basic themes, making it easier to understand how service experiences vary and what drives customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
During report creation, you will be guided to the Dimensions step after setting up your dataset. On this screen, you can browse available dimension types and select those that align with your research goals. As you make selections, they are added to the My List panel, where you can review, adjust, or remove them before continuing.
Once applied, these dimensions structure the dataset within the report, allowing you to explore relationships between feedback, context, and customer experience. This helps you move beyond individual reviews and better understand how different factors — such as service quality, location, or expectations — shape overall perception.
Dimensions do not consume queries from your plan. Instead, they use GPT Credits, which are available as an add-on. These credits do not expire and can be purchased at any time as needed.
The free plan includes 5 GPT Credits, which are automatically provided when you create your account.
Review Report Settings
After completing the Dimensions step, you will be taken to the Review screen — the final stage before starting the analysis.
This screen brings together all your report settings in one place, allowing you to review and finalize your configuration before running the analysis. You can enter the Report Title, confirm the Source, adjust the Report Language, and review the Required Query breakdown.
The Required Query section shows how your queries are distributed across different steps, including data processing and analysis layers. This gives you clear visibility into the expected resource usage before you proceed.
If any changes are needed, you can return to previous steps and update your selections. Once everything is set, you can continue and generate the report.
Create the Report
Once your setup is complete, click Create Report to start the analysis. Kimola processes the collected Yelp reviews, applies the selected analyses, and generates your report automatically.
When the report is ready, it appears in the Reports section. From there, you can explore the results, organize reports under Projects to keep related work together, or prepare the outputs for sharing.
Reports can be exported in multiple formats depending on your workflow. You can download them as Excel files for deeper analysis, export them as PowerPoint or PDF for presentations, or share them via email for easy distribution.
Conclusion
Yelp reviews offer a direct view into real-world customer experiences, reflecting how businesses are evaluated across service quality, environment, and overall interaction.
By collecting and analyzing this data through a structured workflow, you can move beyond individual reviews and uncover the patterns that shape customer satisfaction, expectations, and operational performance.
As with any platform-based data, all collection and analysis should be conducted responsibly and in accordance with platform policies and applicable regulations.
