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Local and reviews · foursquare.com

How to scrape Foursquare

Foursquare (foursquare.com) is a local business and reviews site. Our checks of its public pages are failing at the moment. This guide shows what we see, what we tried, and the settings to use once it works again.

Run the code on this page with your own key: 5,000 free credits for 7 days, no card. Get a free API key →

What you can get

The API returns the rendered HTML of the page. Select the fields you need with extract rules (CSS selectors) or parse the HTML on your side.

Public pages

Page types we check: Public pages.

The pages carry JSON-LD structured data of type LocalBusiness, Place.

Code

Complete scripts: set the UJEEBU_API_KEY environment variable and run them as they are. Each one sends the settings on this page, prints the start of the page, and prints the credits the request cost (the Ujb-Credits response header) on stderr. A non-200 answer stops the script with the API's error message.

foursquare_page_sdk.py pip install ujeebu-python==0.1.5
# Fetch a Foursquare page with the Ujeebu Scrape API.
# Settings from our health checks (Ujeebu site guide). Prints the start of the page HTML.
# Uses the official SDK ujeebu-python 0.1.5: pip install ujeebu-python==0.1.5
# Run: UJEEBU_API_KEY=your_key python3 foursquare_page_sdk.py

import json
import os
import sys
import time

import requests
from ujeebu_python import UjeebuClient

API_KEY = os.environ.get("UJEEBU_API_KEY")
URLS = [
    "https://foursquare.com/v/central-park/412d2800f964a520df0c1fe3",
]
SETTINGS = {
    "js": True,
}


def scrape(client, url):
    try:
        response = client.scrape(url, params=SETTINGS)
    except requests.RequestException as error:
        sys.exit(f"Request failed for {url}: {error}")
    if response.status_code != 200:
        try:
            message = response.json().get("message", response.text)
        except ValueError:
            message = response.text
        sys.exit(f"HTTP {response.status_code} for {url}: {str(message)[:300]}")
    print(f"Ujb-Credits: {response.headers.get('Ujb-Credits')}", file=sys.stderr)
    return response.text


if not API_KEY:
    sys.exit("Set the UJEEBU_API_KEY environment variable.")

client = UjeebuClient(api_key=API_KEY)

for i, url in enumerate(URLS):
    if i:
        time.sleep(2)  # be polite: one page at a time
    html = scrape(client, url)
    print(len(html), "bytes")
    print(html[:500])

SDK tabs use the official Ujeebu SDKs (ujeebu-python 0.1.5, @ujeebu-org/ujeebu-sdk 0.1.2, github.com/ujeebu/ujeebu-go v0.1.8); there is no PHP SDK, so the PHP tab calls the API with curl. For agents and scripts, the same status and settings are at /scrape/foursquare.json.

Try it yourself

Run this on Foursquare with your own key

Get a free API key, set UJEEBU_API_KEY and run any script above as it is. 5,000 free credits for 7 days, no card.

Settings that work today

From our health checks over the last 7 days: the cheapest settings that return the real page most of the time.

Endpoint/scrape
jstrue
Costup to 5 credits a request (only HTTP 200 and 404 are billed)

No proxy passed in the last 7 days: these are the settings we keep trying.

Our engineers are looking at this site.

Each public page is one request: change the path in the URL to fetch another one. Our checks run with JavaScript rendering on (js=true): keep it on. Content behind the login is out of scope: only public pages can be collected.

Try it in the Playground

Troubleshooting

The failures our own checks of foursquare.com ran into over the last 7 days, and what got the page in the same check.

What happenedTimesWhat fixed it
A login wall 20 None of the settings we tried got past it in 7 days.
The page did not load in time 2 Nothing we tried in the same check. Retry later, one request at a time.

A failed request is not billed: only HTTP 200 and 404 responses cost credits.

What people build with Foursquare data

  • Local market researchMap the businesses of a category in a city, with their ratings and price range.More on this use case

Limits and etiquette

  • Public pages only. Pages behind a login, and data shown only to signed-in users, are out of scope.
  • Keep the rate modest: fetch pages one after another or with low concurrency, and cache what you already have.
  • robots.txt of foursquare.com (read 2026-10-13): public pages allowed for generic crawlers; no crawl delay set.
  • Read Foursquare's terms of service before you collect data at scale, and do not collect personal data you have no basis to process. This guide is not legal advice.

Questions

Can you scrape Foursquare with Ujeebu?

Only public pages. In the last 7 days 0 of 16 checks passed: Foursquare showed a login wall to our logged-out requests. Content behind a login is out of scope.

Is it allowed to scrape Foursquare?

Its robots.txt allows generic crawlers on the page types in this guide. Collect public pages only, read Foursquare's terms of service, keep your request rate modest and do not collect personal data you have no basis to process. This is not legal advice.

How fresh is this page?

The status and settings come from our own health checks of foursquare.com, which run around the clock. Last check: 2026-10-12 21:42:42 UTC; no pass recorded yet.