Yelp opens up access to more local content with launch of Fusion API

Yelp is expanding its developer outreach with new tools and the creation of a program to support its usage in third-party apps. The new developer program includes case studies, access to data, and the company’s newest API, aptly called Yelp Fusion, which offers high-quality local content and additional functionality.

“Thousands of products and services” have used Yelp’s traditional API since its launch in 2007, according to the company’s senior vice president of business and corporate development, Chad Richard. But these integrations leveraged limited data from Yelp, perhaps because the company feared someone might scrape its data. Today’s announcement seems focused on bringing local content into more apps and represents a way for Yelp to remain competitive against the likes of Foursquare, Google, and many others in the field.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":2059270,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"dev,","session":"D"}']

Part of this effort involves Yelp Fusion, which not only provides access to more data across the company’s 32 international markets, it also includes ways to search based on price level and operating hours, plus 24-hour content caching, access to original resolution photos and review excepts, autocomplete capability, OAuth 2.0 support, the ability to surface businesses in the food delivery category, and more.

At launch, 12 companies have partnered with Yelp, including Blippar, Hound, Graphiq, Logitech ZeroTouch, and Olii. “One common request from developers is for us to enable them to integrate more content,” Richard said. “Yelp Fusion allows more content than ever.”

Yelp’s original API has been accessed “tens of billions” of times over the past nine years. In fact, it’s so popular that the company said more than 2 billion requests have been made for Yelp content in just the last 30 days alone. Richard declined to state how many developers are using Yelp’s technology, but, in 2015, the company announced that more than 100,000 registered developers were using the API.

Yelp’s new developer portal and resources are available for everyone today.