Yext this week has announced a set of products that are designed to automate and streamline online visibility in the escalating AI era. This includes adding brand-level AI visibility and agentic workflows to its Scout platform, and a new AIO tool that’s purpose-built for the needs and resource constraints of SMBs.
Taking those one at a time, the brand-focused tool will live within Scout as noted, where it will help multi-location brands elevate their AI visibility. It promises to do this by boosting a given brand’s online presence at the location level, where users are increasingly asking questions to AI engines.
This involves the emerging art of AIO by making sure brand locations are present in all of the places that AI pulls data from. Because AIO is a new art form, this offer should resonate, as many brands – as marketing-adept and SEO-trained as they may be – need help mastering the ever-shifting playbook.
“AI visibility is not one thing,” Yext Chief Data Officer Christian Ward told Localogy Insider. “Our research shows vast differences in AI responses even for the same question on the same model. The answer changes by model, query, location, context, and memory. Showing people another score does not solve that (although repeatable measurement is necessary). Brands need to know where they show up, where they do not, why, and what they can do about it. That is what we are building with the combination of Scout and Action Center.”
Content & Capabilities
Importantly, these new capabilities won’t exist in a vacuum, but offer tight integrations within the Scout platform. For example, as Ward notes, Yext is advancing the Scout Action Center in tandem with this move. Launched on August 5, the Action Center lets brands orchestrate Yext agents all in one place.
Working with all of the rich data in Scout, these agents can do things like automatically localize a brand’s social posts and make them relevant across several operational geographies. It can also turn 5-star reviews into social content, and other actions that scale content and capabilities while saving time.
But more than feature lists and capabilities, Yext is delivering results already. In early use, new capabilities doubled inbound leads for a programmatic advertising platform, increased citations by 186 percent for a multi-location hearing care brand, and grew Yext’s own AI visibility by 147 percent.
This is all underscored by the point made above: marketers need AIO help. Yext points to a Corporate Ink survey in which 88 percent of CMOs and VP-level marketers are being asked by leadership or their board about AI visibility. But only 34 percent of the same folks say they have a defined AI visibility strategy.
Meanwhile, all the above is in pilot stages with a few choice partners, and will be broadly available September 30. Until then, it ostensibly has all the ingredients that will resonate with multi-location brand marketers by helping to both automate and elevate their AIO – things they’re explicitly clamoring for.
Deskless Modality
On to the SMB-focused component of this announcement, it establishes an SMB agent harness. Known as Corvo AI, it takes many of the above principles and adapts them for the unique needs of SMBs. Those needs include being time-starved, resource-constrained, tech-challenged, and often “deskless.”
That last part is the SMB factor that makes them particularly fitting for agentic workflows, which is the angle seldom discussed. Corvo leans into this principle by automating AI visibility on their behalf and in the background. And it offers a mobile-first natural-language UI for the deskless modality.
Corvo’s deliverables include proactively texting SMB operators with action items for improving their local marketing, and ways they can outrank competition in local visibility. This will be welcome knowledge as they, like the multi-location marketers above, are AI-interested but AI-ignorant (our words).
Altogether, the theme is pretty clear. Both SMBs and multi-location brands share a need for help when it comes to being visible and optimized in AI engines. They need their hands held, or better yet, agents to execute for them. This is Yext’s latest step in an ongoing mission to make that vision tangibly happen.
“Small business owners do not want another platform to log into or another dashboard to check,” said Ward. “They are busy just running their business. Corvo watches what is happening in their market and texts them when there is something worth knowing or doing. It might be as simple as ‘A competitor moved ahead of you. Here is why. Do you want me to help fix it?’ That is the whole idea.”
