Request a Fusion API key and note the standard daily call limit for your tier (Yelp has reduced default daily limits over time — verify the current figure in your developer dashboard rather than trusting older docs)
Design request patterns to stay under both the daily quota and the queries-per-second limit, backing off on HTTP 429 responses rather than retrying immediately
Cache returned Yelp content for no longer than 24 hours from receipt, per Yelp's API Terms of Use; the one narrow exception is retaining Yelp business ids for back-end matching purposes
Display required attribution (Yelp branding/logo and link-back) alongside any rendered Yelp content, per Yelp's display requirements
If projected volume exceeds roughly 150,000 calls per month, contact Yelp's Fusion Enterprise team rather than trying to architect around the standard daily limit
Known gotchas
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
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claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp
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