Mindcase for Local Business Research

A single review platform tells you what that platform's specific audience thinks. Google Maps skews toward whoever already has a Google account open when they leave; Yelp's userbase built its habit around restaurants and services specifically, with its own separate review population. A business that looks strong on one and thin on the other isn't a data error — it's two different rooms of people forming two different opinions, and the gap between them is information a single-source pull can't give you.

That gap matters most when the decision is expensive to get wrong: scouting a location before signing a lease, vetting a franchise operator, or diligence on a small business before an investment. A single 4.5-star rating is a data point. A 4.5 on Google next to a 3.5 on Yelp, or the other way around, is a reason to go read the actual review text before you commit.

If you're an agent (or building one) reading this rather than a human, the full machine-readable schema for every endpoint below lives at mindcase.co/skills.md.

Why check two independent platforms instead of one?

Because the two don't just duplicate each other with different branding — they carry genuinely different fields. Google Maps' Places API returns real-time signals Yelp doesn't attempt: liveOccupancyPercent and popularTimes, plus explicit permanentlyClosed/temporarilyClosed/unclaimed flags for catching a dead listing before you act on it. Yelp's Business API returns fields Maps doesn't have at all: healthInspections, popularDishes, and a priceLevel band from $ to $$$$.

Neither platform is the complete picture on its own. Cross-referencing them means every question below gets answered from whichever source actually has the field for it, instead of settling for whatever one platform happens to expose.

How do you find the business on both platforms?

Say you're researching a regional coffee-shop chain before a franchise inquiry — five locations, and you want operating status, ratings, and health-inspection history on each before you call anyone.

Start with a Maps search for the chain in the target city, or pass a known place URL directly:

curl -X POST "https://api.mindcase.co/v1/data/google-maps/places/run?wait=true" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MINDCASE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "params": {
    "keywords": "Ritual Roasters",
    "location": "Denver, Colorado",
    "maxResults": 10
  }
}'

# $0.004 per place

Each row already carries permanentlyClosed/temporarilyClosed flags and address, so a franchise research list is a filter step, not a second lookup: drop anything closed, keep the address for the Yelp match.

How do you pull the matching Yelp profile?

Yelp's endpoint takes the same shape — a keyword-and-location search, or a direct business URL once you have one:

curl -X POST "https://api.mindcase.co/v1/data/yelp/business/run?wait=true" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MINDCASE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "params": {
    "keyword": "Ritual Roasters",
    "location": "Denver, CO",
    "limit": 1
  }
}'

# $0.0005 per business

Business API returns 25 fields per profile — rating, totalReviews, starBreakdown, priceLevel, and, for food-service businesses, healthInspections and popularDishes. Matching is manual: there's no shared ID between Google Maps and Yelp, so you confirm the row is the same physical location by address, not by a join key.

What does Yelp surface that Google Maps doesn't?

Two fields worth building a workflow around specifically.

healthInspections. Where the underlying municipal data is available, Yelp surfaces inspection history directly on the business profile — a field with no Google Maps equivalent at all. For food-service diligence, that's the difference between reading a rating and reading a regulator's own finding.

starBreakdown on both platforms, side by side. A rating of 4.0 built from mostly 4- and 5-star reviews reads differently than the same 4.0 built from a bimodal split of 5-star and 1-star reviews with nothing in between — the second shape means a polarizing experience, not a consistently average one. Pulling starBreakdown from both Maps and Yelp and comparing the shapes, not just the headline number, catches that distinction on either platform alone.

What can't you get from Mindcase?

Two cases.

There's no automatic match between a Maps listing and a Yelp profile. Both endpoints take a keyword-and-location search or a direct URL, but neither returns the other platform's ID. Confirming two rows are the same business is a manual address check, not something either API does for you.

A business absent from a platform stays absent. If a business was never claimed on Yelp, or was added to Google Maps but nowhere else, there's no row to return from the missing side — coverage still depends on whether the business exists on that platform at all, the same limitation either API carries on its own.

Which endpoint should you use for which job?

Checking one location across both platforms — a Maps place lookup plus a Yelp business lookup — costs under half a cent. Five locations for a franchise research pass costs about two cents before you've read a single review.

FAQ