Summer '22 Release is Now Live!

For those of you who are new to Hitchhikers — Welcome to Yext's training platform & community! Hitchhikers is the home for all of Yext's product and release updates so we encourage you to create a free user and check out the platform.

Yext's seasonal releases are always packed with new features and functionality to keep Hitchhikers on the cutting edge of search, and the Summer '22 Release is no different. Across the product suite we have added new features that will help you to drive value and improve your user experience.

Here are just a few of the powerful new features in the Summer '22 Release:

In the Summer '22 Release, we're excited to support several new analytics features for Google Business Profile which will significantly improve a business's ability to track performance, understand trends, and identify areas for improvement.

Google released a new Business Performance API in late June, which offers game-changing new user data and performance metrics. We've integrated with these new endpoints to allow users to view the following metrics in Yext's Report Builder:

• Google Search Keywords

• Number of Business Bookings

• Number of Food Orders

• Business Conversations (the number of messages received on the GBP listing)

• Desktop vs. Mobile Views on Maps and Search

One of the most valuable additions from this Performance API is the monthly list of search keywords. This allows businesses to pinpoint which keywords are successfully driving users to their listing. Imagine how insightful this list of keywords would be for a content manager. There could be an opportunity to incorporate these high-value keywords more throughout the listing, or on SEO-optimized pages, on first-party search content, or anywhere else in their digital presence.

Lastly, users will be able to toggle on or off Google Call History from the Yext platform, which will allow them to track the calls placed from their listing (broken down by answered vs. missed). This data will be viewable within the Google Business Profile platform.

Note: Due to Google's current restrictions, Google Call History is only available for businesses in the US or Canada.

Sometimes the most important part of managing listings is just showing up! And we're dedicated to making sure your listings show up across our publisher network — every single time.

To accomplish this, we're revamping our Listings' "Status Details" messaging to include even more details than they did before. This will make it much easier for content managers to troubleshoot the problem when they run into an occasional listing that is not properly synced with a publisher.

Sometimes, you mistype a character when inputting a website's URL into the Knowledge Graph. Sometimes, you forget to fill out the address field altogether…for a location listing! (It's okay, it happens to the best of us). Or sometimes, there are publisher-side technical issues that none of us can control.

If any of these circumstances occurred, the listing would be not synced, and customers may not be able to find updated facts about this brand. That's why we enhanced our Status Details to offer additional guidance regarding the reason, the impact, and the steps (if any) that the account manager can take to resolve the issue. As a result, it will reduce any ambiguity the account manager could face and will help them resolve the issue as fast as possible!

Note: Improved Status Detail Messages will become available in the General Availability release, which is currently planned for September 8th, and will not be available for Early Access.

With the Summer '22 Release, now any developer can build custom Yext Pages.

We know building search optimized web pages is no easy task. Throughout the process your team may be left with more questions than answers. How do we make it faster? How do we rank higher in search? How do we scale across the enterprise for our locations/products/services?

Yext Pages makes it easy for any developer to build ridiculously fast, SEO optimized pages using familiar git-based workflows and the toolchain that works best for them.

With the new Pages architecture released in Summer '22, developers can take advantage of functionality like:

Best-in-Class Developer Experience

We know every developer likes to work differently. That's why we've built a flexible architecture that lets Developers:

• Develop locally and deploy code to the Yext platform using our native CI/CD system

• Connect their GitHub account to a Yext site — Yext will listen for code changes to the repositoryand deploy the result to a global CDN

• Take advantage of modern development tools for web development, such as React, Vite, Webpack, TailwindCSS, and more

• Collaborate with line of business users through the Knowledge Graph, Page Previews, and more

With Yext, developers also have access to the Hitchhikers platform. Whether you are looking for robust documentation, live coding clinics, sandbox environments, an online community, and more — Hitchhikers is a one stop shop for all developers and power users of the Yext platform.

Built in SEO Optimization & State-of-the-Art Jamstack Architecture

A great search strategy requires two things:

• The SEO Strategy itself — Including content, keyword optimization, and design.

• The underlying technology — Including page performance, architecture, structured data, content delivery, and more.

Pages built on the Yext platform include the important technical SEO ranking factors out-of-the-box, such as schema markup, responsive design, keywords in meta tags, and more.

In addition to SEO optimization, Yext's Pages are built on a state-of-the-art Jamstack Architecture. Now, developers across the world — from startups to the enterprise — have access to the bleeding edge page building architecture.

Pages uses a unique streaming architecture to scale static generation into the enterprise. Through the use of a patented multi-step build process, data changes can be published to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) in seconds — even when the site has millions of pages.

By developing on the Yext platform your team can focus on the strategy and design while we take care of the technology.

Leverage the Power of the Knowledge Graph

For those who have worked with Yext, you know the Knowledge Graph is the foundation of all the amazing digital experiences you power. Now, all organizations around the world can develop custom pages while empowering your content strategists with the Knowledge Graph.

Content updates to the Knowledge Graph feed data directly into your page templates and get deployed to your production site in seconds. The Knowledge Graph is built for the enterprise and provides out-of-the-box functionality like:

• Content Localization

• Image Optimization

• Robust Workflows & Suggestions

• User Permissioning

• And so much more

Note: You must be on the new Pages architecture to take advantage of these new Pages features.

Our teams are always working on ways we can make it easier for users to bring data into the Knowledge Graph to power awesome digital experiences. In the Summer '22 Release, we made tremendous progress in two key areas: transforming new data entering the Knowledge Graph and widening the range of sources from which users can pull in data via Connectors.

AI Data Cleaning (Preview Feature)

As of this release, users can now harness the power of machine learning in the Connectors framework with the introduction of our AI Data Cleaning transform. This new transform takes user-provided examples of input/output transformations to create and apply a model for transforming data.

Using only 3 examples, our AI Data Cleaning algorithm can automate specific data manipulations at scale, without needing a user to write custom functions. This added flexibility is extremely helpful for users who may otherwise have difficulty with or be unable to write the necessary logic they need to make complex transformations to their data.

For instance, with AI Data Cleaning, users could train a model with only 3 samples of input/output pairs (see examples below) to extract a price value from variable text strings (e.g., promotional messages). The model is then applied at scale to a column of your ingested data to transform the inputs into the desired outputs.

Custom OAuth

It's crucial that our platform can ingest data from each and every source our customers use to store their business data. Over the last two releases, we've made significant upgrades to our Connectors framework, which now enables us to access data from any API that requires OAuth 2.0 authentication.

In the Spring '22 release, we added support for OAuth 2.0 as an authentication method in Connectors, enabling users to make authenticated API requests to providers we had built-in support for such as Google Drive, Salesforce, and others. This Summer, we've built upon this functionality by adding support for Custom Providers. This feature allows users to configure their own custom providers, providing maximum flexibility by ensuring that businesses do not need to rely on Yext's built-in providers in order to integrate with APIs that require OAuth 2.0. Once a user has configured a custom provider, they can link accounts for that provider and create custom Pull-From-API Connectors that use OAuth 2.0 authentication to access APIs.

This makes way for a wide range of new data sources that users can pull data from into Yext — regardless of OAuth authentication requirements — making it easier than ever to bring your business data into the Yext platform, wherever it may live.

We're making it easier than ever to build a completely customized search UI with our new Search UI React v1.0. If you remember, we announced our React component library in the Spring '22 Release. We've made some enhancements since then and are eager to share the first official version this summer.

Developers can expect all of the same benefits as before, like balancing flexibility with the convenience of using Yext search components, in addition to the following upgrades made in v1.0:

• New FilterSearch component

• New Facet components including StandardFacets, HierarchicalFacets, and NumericalFacets

• Importable Sandbox Endpoints

• Better support for overriding built-in Tailwind styles

To learn more, visit our @yext/search-ui-react documentation. Additionally, check out the Inspiration Hub to get some ideas about what you can build on top of the Yext platform by looking at projects submitted by other developers. Or better yet, submit your own project!

That's not all! To learn more about the Summer '22 Release including demos, deep dives, new publishers and more, check out the Hitchhikers exclusive Sneak Peek: Summer '22 Release webinar recording with the Yext Product team.

If you have any questions or feedback related to the release, please stop by the Hitchhikers Community. We have specific topics for each release item and will have the experts standing by, ready to answer any questions you have.

We know many of the Hitchhikers will want to check out everything in the Summer '22 release. For the full list of features head to the Summer '22 Release Notes.