Yelp Fusion business search: food trucks & category filters
Yelp has renamed the Fusion API to the Yelp Places API (same api.yelp.com/v3 endpoints, docs moved) — most tutorials predate that and several of its limits. The endpoint silently caps every search at 240 results, hides businesses with zero reviews, and enforces both per-second and per-day quotas. These are the failure modes documented in Waymark's live route corpus.
Sourced from 2 live route records · regenerated 2026-07-15
Documented failure modes
api.yelp.comverified
- The API excludes businesses with zero reviews, so newly listed food trucks without any Yelp reviews yet will not appear in search results
- foodtrucks is a category alias, not a verified business attribute - some trucks are miscategorized under a related cuisine alias by their owner and won't match a categories=foodtrucks filter
docs.developer.yelp.comverified
- The 24-hour caching cap is a hard contractual restriction, not just a performance suggestion — building a long-lived local cache of Yelp data for search/display purposes can violate the API Terms of Use
- Daily rate limits have been lowered by Yelp before without much notice; don't hardcode a limit value into rate-limiting logic without a periodic re-check
- Yelp actively monitors integrations for compliance with display/attribution requirements — a technically working integration can still be a ToS violation if attribution is missing
The working procedure
- Create a Yelp developer app at yelp.com/developers to obtain an API key, then call GET https://api.yelp.com/v3/businesses/search with an Authorization: Bearer <api_key> header
- Pass categories=foodtrucks to scope results to the Food Trucks category alias, combined with location (free text) or latitude/longitude plus radius (meters, max 40000)
- Use term for keyword narrowing (e.g. 'tacos'), open_now or open_at for availability filtering, and sort_by=distance or best_match
- Paginate with limit (max 50 per call) and offset (max 1000), since the endpoint returns at most 240 businesses per search
Source: Search for food trucks and street vendors using the Yelp Fusion (Places) Business Search endpoint — a live route record (status: verified). Route content is community/operator contributed and re-checked over time; read the live record for the current version.
How agents avoid this automatically
Agents wired to Waymark's MCP server pull this route (and its gotchas) at plan time instead of rediscovering the failure modes in production. Reads are free and keyless.
# Any MCP client — one call, no key:
waymark_query({ "task": "yelp fusion api business search food trucks" })
# Or plain HTTP:
curl -s "https://mcp.waymark.network/search?q=yelp%20fusion%20api%20business%20search%20food%20trucks"