New Yext Research: How Marketers Can Turn Verified Data into Real Brand Visibility
See how Brand Certified Facts drive measurable lift across search and AI discovery — and why data provenance matters now.
Pete Rimshnick
Feb 4, 2026
TL;DR: Verified brand data matters more for driving visibility than you might think. In controlled tests, Brand Certified Facts drove statistically significant click lift on Bing, Yahoo, and Google Gemini. As search continues to play a bigger role in discovery, data provenance is becoming a true visibility signal.
Why brand visibility looks different today
With AI search now mainstream, customers find answers and make decisions across a mix of AI platforms, search engines, maps, and more.
One thing that’s consistent? AI and search algorithms are deciding which brand data gets surfaced, repackaged, and cited — rather than leaving it to people to comb through long lists of links.
For marketers, this creates a real gap. The strategies that worked when visibility was only about ranking pages don’t fully apply. And while most teams know they need to adapt, it’s not always clear which signals actually drive visibility and engagement in this new environment.
That uncertainty is what motivated our latest research: as search evolves, what role does trusted, verifiable brand data play in earning visibility and driving action? And what steps can brands take today?
Introducing Location.com: a new foundation for brand data
Answering these questions all started with Location.com.
Location.com is Yext’s home for brand-authoritative location data on the open web, helping our customers get cited more. And, while competitors are guessing or relying on SEO-era assumptions, we wanted to take a different approach: testing what actually works in live search environments, measuring the results, and turning those learnings directly into product capabilities.
Brand Certified Facts (BCF) is the first major output of that experiment. It uses a type of code in a completely new way to signal your brand’s official business information directly to search engines and AI — and it's baked right into Yext Pages and Location.com. It confirms that details like your name, address, hours (and more) truly came from your brand and were updated at a specific moment in time.
The tl;dr? It makes brand data more authoritative, more citable, and more visible in traditional and AI search.
But just how much more visible can this backend signature make your brand? Or, in other words, how much does data provenance — the record of where data came from and how it was created — matter?
Quite a bit, it turns out. Our research shows that Brand Certified Facts drives up to a 9% lift on Google Gemini and up to 37% lift on Bing and Yahoo.*
Read on to find out more.
How we tested the impact of verified data
We ran two experiments between October 2025 and January 2026 to measure how Brand Certified Facts affect real-world search performance. Read below for the technical methodology, or scroll right down to the full results.
Location.com (A/B Test): We deployed BCF on 80% of our directory pages and kept 20% without, then tracked click referrals from Google, Bing, and Yahoo, as well as Scout Citations for Google Gemini. We used an Adjusted Rate Ratio with a 4.0 scaling factor to normalize for the 80/20 split, and calculated 95% confidence intervals to determine statistical significance.
Brand Websites (Pre/Post): We measured average daily hits before and after BCF implementation across seven customer sites.
To isolate real user behavior from crawler activity, we segmented all traffic using Cloudflare's bot score:
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Most likely human traffic (bot score > 90): Real users clicking on listings
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Likely human traffic (bot score 30–90): Contains some mixed signals
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Most likely bot traffic (bot score < 30): Crawlers and automated systems
Location.com results
The headline finding? Brand Certified Facts drives statistically significant click lift on Bing, Yahoo, and Google Gemini.
Human Traffic (Bot Score > 90):
| Search Engine | Page Views / Citations w/ BCF | Page Views / Citations w/o BCF | Percent Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bing | 4,290 | 792 | +35.4% |
| Yahoo | 3,496 | 637 | +37.2% |
| Google SERP | 10,963 | 2,689 | +1.9% |
| Google Gemini | 41,044 | 9,403 | +9.2% |
Bing delivered a 35.4% click lift and Yahoo delivered a 37.2% lift. Traditional Google search showed a modest 1.9% improvement.
But when we looked at citations from Yext Scout, we found that Google Gemini showed a statistically significant 9.2% lift in results from pages with BCF.
This shows that even in situations where traditional search indexing may not yet recognize these trust signals, AI products already do.
Brand website results
Our analysis of BCF implemented directly on local pages for Yext customer websites showed positive trends for most sites as well, with the strongest performers in human traffic:
| Site | Pre BCF (Avg Page Views/Day) | Post BCF (Avg Page Views/Day) | Percent Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer A | 1,423 | 2,045 | +43.7% |
| Customer B | 1,974 | 2,349 | +19.0% |
| Customer C | 66,540 | 70,311 | +5.7% |
| Customer D | 142,446 | 140,514 | -1.4% |
Customer A saw a 43.7% increase in human traffic after implementing Brand Certified Facts on their site. Customer B saw +19%, and Customer C saw a modest +5.7%. Customer D was essentially flat.
(Important caveat: The brand website data is a pre- / post-comparison without a control group. Changes could be influenced by seasonality, marketing campaigns, or other factors. These results are directionally encouraging but not as rigorous as the A/B tested location.com data.)
What this all means for marketers
The percent increases we measured in visibility and actions as a result of Brand Certified Facts show that:
1. Verified data can drive real demand outside of traditional Google search.
The largest lifts we observed were on Bing and Yahoo — platforms many brands underinvest in, despite their growing role in AI-driven experiences. Diversifying visibility and performing your best — everywhere – starts with making your data trustworthy wherever it’s used.
2. AI systems already value provenance.
Again, you can think of “data provenance” as data’s “paper trail.” If you can’t explain how a number got there, you don’t really trust it — and AI thinks similarly.
Even where traditional search results haven’t fully reflected these trust signals, our results show that Google Gemini has. As AI answers become a primary interface for customer discovery, being a verifiable source matters a lot.
3. Search is being built for attribution, not just relevance.
As AI-generated answers skyrocket, systems need to know where information comes from and whether it can be trusted. Brand Certified Facts are designed for that future.
The big takeaway: This isn’t about short-term optimization tricks. It’s about giving traditional and AI search platforms a clear, machine-readable signal that says, “this information comes directly from the brand, and it hasn’t been altered.” That verification gives models confidence — and gives you visibility gains as a result.
With Location.com and Yext Pages as the authoritative sources and Brand Certified Facts as the verification layer, brands can publish data with authority — and be recognized for it.
The bottom line: verified data boosts performance
Our hypothesis was that verifiable brand data would perform better where trust signals matter most. The results support that idea, with nuance.
Where trust is scarce — and especially where AI systems are involved — verified data is already delivering measurable lift. As AI search grows and discovery continues to fragment, that foundation will only become more important to driving brand visibility.
Click here to learn more about what makes a great AI-ready local page.
*This research was supported by Yext Research.
