Yelp Places API vs Overture Maps Places for AI agents
Yelp Places API is Yelp's licensed API (formerly Yelp Fusion) for searching businesses and reading Yelp business details, ratings, photos and review excerpts. Overture Maps Places is an open, monthly-released dataset of places (points of interest), downloadable as Parquet files. It is not an API.
The short answer
- Yelp Places API: Yelp ratings, review excerpts and photos for restaurants and local services in consumer apps that display Yelp content. The terms rule out passing that content to an LLM.
- Overture Maps Places: A free, permissively licensed global POI base you can store, index and serve yourself. Not live data, and with no hours, ratings or reviews.
Side by side
| Yelp Places API | Overture Maps Places | |
|---|---|---|
| Searches | Local businesses listed on Yelp. Yelp says it covers "millions of businesses around the world," and the supported-locales page lists 32 countries. | Nothing to call. You download or query the files yourself, for example with DuckDB. It contains tens of millions of places such as schools, businesses, hospitals and landmarks. |
| Returns | JSON over REST at https://api.yelp.com/v3. Results include name, address, phone, Yelp rating, price level, review count, coordinates, categories, image and Yelp URL. Photos and review excerpts depend on the plan. | GeoParquet place records with names, addresses, taxonomy and basic_category (which replaced categories in September 2026), phones, websites, socials, a 0–1 confidence score and source info. |
| Before the first call | A Yelp developer account (a business email is required for the trial) and a private API key. Paid plans need a credit card on file. | Nothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage. |
| Free | A 30-day trial with up to 5,000 API calls, for evaluation only, not commercial use. There is no permanent free tier. | No key needed, and its pages state no price |
| Paid | Base costs $229 a month plus $5.91 per extra 1,000 calls. Enhanced costs $299 a month plus $6.57 per 1,000. Premium costs $643 a month plus $14.13 per 1,000. The FAQ says paid plans include 30,000 calls a month by default. | Not stated on its pages |
| Acting on a result | Results include the business phone number and its Yelp page URL. There is no way to message a business through the Places API. | Records can include phones, websites and social links. There is no messaging; it is static data. |
| Limits on keeping or showing results | No caching or storing of Yelp Content for more than 24 hours. No building your own business-listing database from it. Display Requirements apply, and Yelp can require removal of content within 24 hours. | You can store and reuse it. Licensed CDLA Permissive 2.0 or Apache 2.0 depending on source (Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and others); some sources need their own attribution. Does not include OpenStreetMap data. |
| AI in its terms | Very restrictive. Section 9 bans training or fine-tuning generative AI models on Yelp Content. Section 9.4 bans submitting or ingesting any Yelp Content into any Generative AI Model, for example in prompts to ChatGPT. Yelp sells a separate Yelp AI API for conversational use at $25 per 1,000 calls. | Not stated on its pages |
| Coverage | 32 countries in Yelp's supported-locales list, including the US. | Global. Release 2026-09-23.1, published monthly. |
| MCP server | Yelp/yelp-mcp on GitHub (https://github.com/Yelp/yelp-mcp). It wraps the Yelp Fusion AI API with one yelp_agent tool and needs a Yelp Fusion AI key, not a Places API key. | No official server listed |
Where Openpath fits
If the agent needs a local business to message in Austin, Texas, Openpath returns the listings themselves, free and with no key. See Openpath vs Yelp Places API and Openpath vs Overture Maps Places.
Questions people ask
What do I need before I can use Yelp Places API?
A Yelp developer account (a business email is required for the trial) and a private API key. Paid plans need a credit card on file.
Is Yelp Places API free?
A 30-day trial with up to 5,000 API calls, for evaluation only, not commercial use. There is no permanent free tier.
What do I need before I can use Overture Maps Places?
Nothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage.
Is Overture Maps Places free?
No key needed, and its pages state no price.
Sources
Every line about another company comes from its own pages. Prices and terms change, so check the source before you rely on one.
Yelp Places API, read on October 15, 2026:
- business.yelp.com/data/resources/pricing: “$229 per month plus $5.91 per additional 1,000 API calls”
- business.yelp.com/data/resources/pricing: “$299 per month plus $6.57 per additional 1,000 API calls”
- business.yelp.com/data/resources/pricing: “$643 per month plus $14.13 per additional 1,000 API calls”
- business.yelp.com/data/resources/pricing: “Receive 5,000 free API calls during the 30-day trial period”
- business.yelp.com/data/resources/pricing: “Start 30-day free trial Business email required”
- business.yelp.com/data/resources/pricing: “$25 / 1,000 API calls Minimum 1,000 daily API calls”
- docs.developer.yelp.com/docs/places-faq: “These API calls are STRICTLY FOR EVALUATION AND NOT FOR COMMERCIAL DEPLOYMENT”
- docs.developer.yelp.com/docs/places-faq: “This plan includes 30,000 API calls per month by default”
- docs.developer.yelp.com/docs/places-intro: “valuable information such as name, address, phone number, Yelp rating, price levels, and review counts”
- docs.developer.yelp.com/docs/places-intro: “The Yelp Places API uses private key authentication to authenticate all endpoints.”
- docs.developer.yelp.com/docs/places-intro: “millions of businesses around the world”
- terms.yelp.com/developers/api_terms: “opt into a paid subscription program by providing credit card and other necessary information”
- terms.yelp.com/developers/api_terms: “cache, record, pre-fetch, or otherwise store any portion of the Yelp Content for a period longer than twenty-four (24) hours”
- terms.yelp.com/developers/api_terms: “use it to update or create your own database of business listing information”
- terms.yelp.com/developers/api_terms: “Submit or ingest any Yelp Content into any Generative AI Model (e.g., prompts that contain any Yelp Content into ChatGPT”
- terms.yelp.com/developers/api_terms: “for the purpose of training, developing, enhancing, or fine-tuning any Generative AI Models without Yelp’s prior written approval”
- github.com/Yelp/yelp-mcp: “MCP server for exposing tools powered by Yelp's data”
- docs.developer.yelp.com/docs/resources-supported-locales: “Following are the locales Yelp Places API supports.”
Overture Maps Places, read on October 15, 2026:
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “The Overture places theme contains tens of millions of point representations of real-world entities”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “Places is published under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses, depending on the source.”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “The theme does not include OpenStreetMap data.”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-09-23.1/theme=places/type=place/*”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “The categories property has been removed from the places schema as of the September 2026 release”
- docs.overturemaps.org/guides/places: “confidence , CAST ( websites AS JSON ) AS websites , CAST ( socials AS JSON ) AS socials”
- docs.overturemaps.org/attribution: “Some of the data sources we use in Overture datasets require their own attribution, according to their licenses.”
- docs.overturemaps.org/attribution: “Data from Meta . Available under CDLA Permissive 2.0 .”