Quick answer
Google Maps is the better source for prospecting, mostly because of coverage and because its API terms allow building a business database. Yelp's API terms specifically prohibit using its content to create your own listing database or for commercial resale, which rules out most lead-generation use cases regardless of how good the data is.
Coverage
Google Maps has broader coverage of local businesses, particularly outside major metros and in trades like roofing, HVAC, and general contracting where a business may have a Google Business Profile and no Yelp presence at all.
Yelp skews toward consumer-facing categories in dense urban areas. Restaurants, bars, salons, and dentists are well covered. A concrete contractor in a small town may not be there.
For prospecting, coverage matters more than depth. A tool that misses a third of your target market is a problem no amount of review detail fixes.
The part that actually decides it
Yelp's API terms of use are strict in ways that matter specifically for lead generation. Their restrictions section prohibits caching content beyond 24 hours, prohibits using Yelp content to create or update your own database of business listings, prohibits displaying Yelp ratings alongside other user-generated content, and prohibits commercial use of the content without written consent.
Read together, those clauses rule out essentially every prospecting workflow. Building a lead list is definitionally creating your own database of business listing information.
This is not a knock on Yelp. Those terms exist to protect a consumer review platform from being strip-mined, which is a reasonable thing to want. It just means Yelp is not a viable input for this particular job.
Check the current terms yourself before building anything. They change, and the version that matters is the one in force when you ship.
What each platform is genuinely better at
| Google Maps | Yelp | |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage of trades and contractors | Strong | Patchy outside metros |
| Consumer categories in dense cities | Strong | Strong |
| Review depth and detail | Good | Often richer |
| Usable for building a prospect list | Yes | Restricted by API terms |
| Useful for researching one business | Yes | Yes |
Where Yelp is still worth your time
Researching a single prospect before a call is completely fine. Reading someone's Yelp reviews to understand what their customers complain about is normal preparation, and it is often the most useful thing you can do in the ten minutes before you dial.
There is also a service angle. Plenty of local businesses have a neglected Yelp presence, and cleaning it up is something agencies charge for. That is selling a service around the platform rather than extracting data from it.
The practical answer
Build your list from Google Maps data. Use Yelp the way a salesperson would, one prospect at a time, as research before a conversation.
And whichever source you use, the list itself is not the hard part. Deciding which twenty of three hundred businesses deserve an email this week is the work, and no data source does that for you.