Digital presence platform Yext has launched its latest product: Scout. The AI search and competitive intelligence agent is designed to help multi-location brands navigate and operate within a quickly- changing search environment. This includes a fragmented mix of places to get found online.
For example, Yext Scout helps brands gain insights into where they’re showing up across both traditional search engines and a new crop of AI-fueled search platforms. The latter of course includes tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, where users are increasingly turning to find and discover local businesses.
These insights can then help businesses benchmark their SEO and broader digital marketing performance against competitors. Indeed, the first step to optimizing one’s online presence is to establish a baseline of where they, and their closest competitors, currently stand.
But importantly, it’s not just a static intelligence tool. Scout’s most valuable outputs are perhaps translating those insights into actionable recommendations in a given brand’s marketing tactics. Those recommendations flow directly into marketing and visibility actions within Yext’s platform.
Boiling it Down
Going deeper into Scout’s features, Yext reports to Localogy Insider that they include a set of reporting and insights functions that help businesses get a better sense of where they’re showing up in all the above places. To boil it down, here are a few highlights of Scout’s capabilities.
Comprehensive Search Visibility: Monitor brand presence and sentiment across AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, as well as traditional search engines like Google and Bing at the national and hyper-local levels.
Competitive Benchmarking: Understand how brands stack up against competitors, uncover why they’re winning, and gain insights to optimize local and AI search presence.
Actionable Recommendations: Users get prioritized, data-driven insights to improve visibility, sentiment, and rankings, ensuring that their brand remains top-of-mind for AI search agents and human consumers.
Effortless Execution: Users can take action to improve visibility and sentiment directly within the Yext platform, with a focus on the key drivers of online visibility, including listings accuracy, online reputation, web content, and social content.
Yext Acquires Places Scout to Elevate its Location Intelligence
Timing is Everything
Back to the part about a quickly-evolving search landscape, and the fragmented set of places to get found online, these macro factors make Scout well-timed. As the number of places to find a business grows, so too does the number of places a given business needs to be present and optimized.
This means that as the universe continues to fragment with traditional and new AI-driven search engines, the job of multi-location brand marketers gets more complex. This trend is a positive one for companies like Yext because their ability to federate and simplify all that complexity grows in value.
But Yext isn’t content to just watch these trends inherently boost demand for its platform. It’s actively building tools that align with a changing set of marketing needs. Yext Scout is the latest in that effort, and we’re confident we’ll continue to see lots more, some of which will be discussed on stage at L25.
Lastly, we’ll acknowledge the implications in the product’s name. “Scout” is close to Places Scout, the company Yext just acquired. Yext confirmed to us during the production of this article, that this isn’t the wholesale integration of Places Scout, but it did contribute to the mix. We’ll keep following it closely
