Spring '23 Release Notes

There is now an Automatic Review Response App available in the Yext App Directory, which allows businesses to configure automatic replies to reviews based on basic criteria, such as the minimum star rating and whether or not the review includes any content.

This app can serve as a time-saving option to respond to a subset of reviews with a specific, standard response.

For example, a business could set up this rule:

• For every review with a star rating of 4 and above, reply: “Thank you for your kind review! We love hearing from our happy customers”

Although this tool is available, Yext’s guidance regarding review response has not changed. Customers prefer responses that are personalized to them, and demonstrate individual attention to the content of their review. Automatic replies should be used sparingly.

This tool can provide businesses that receive a large volume of reviews the opportunity to spend more of their time resolving complex, urgent reviews, while still sending a prompt acknowledgement that the positive reviews were received.

This app was automatically added to all Sandbox and Production accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

Users can now utilize the “Reviewer Email” asset in the Intelligent Review Response tool in order to reference the email address of the person who left the review in their replies to the review.

This is useful when a business needs to confirm the contact information of a customer so that they can resolve their issue.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Reviewer Email in IRR Assets (early access).

Users now have the ability to modify Rich Text Featured Snippets in Experience Training.

Rich Text Featured Snippets are featured snippets that leverage rich text elements like headers and lists to provide structured, direct answers to user queries.

This update expands user control over the specific piece of an answer they want to call out of a featured snippet for a given search query. This allows the searcher to find answers faster by being presented with the exact answer they’re looking for.

Easily choose segments of rich text fields to be returned as a Rich Text Featured Snippet in search results, or selecting a passage from the rich text to be returned as an Extractive QA-style snippet.

Rich Text Featured Snippets today are only available in select languages. Visit our Supported Languages reference document to learn which languages are available today.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Modify Rich Text Featured Snippets in Experience Training (early access).

With the Spring ’23 Release, users now have the ability to modify NLP Filters in Experience Training.

NLP Filters are filters that are inferred from a user’s query using natural language processing. For example, inferring from the query “blue shoes” to apply a filter, Color = Blue.

In Experience Training, users will now be able to review NLP Filter predictions made for a query, and override them by removing, adding, or selecting different filters. Options include selecting filters by vertical, field, and value for any given search term. Administrators can decide which filters get applied for any given search and ensure that search results are reflective of the intended criteria the user typed.

For example, a user could search for “dress shirt” and the search results could be misinterpreted by using the filter “dresses”. With the ability to modify NLP filters in Experience training, admins have the opportunity to fix these misinterpretations for future searches with this criteria. Results can be refined more accurately, and as a result, the end-user can find relevant answers faster, without needing to actively adjust filters.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Modify NLP Filters in Experience Training (early access).

After revamping our Query Suggestions engine in the Fall ’22 Release to add features like token prefix matching and faster indexing, we are now adding several additional enhancements.

• Improved token prefix matching logic: We have further improved our token prefix matching logic to understand whether parts of the user’s query are complete or incomplete words. For example, if a user starts to type “can I,” the system will no longer trigger a match with the autocomplete prompt, “Cancel my scheduled update” because it understands that “can” is a completed word, and should not be used for a prefix match on the word “cancel.”

• Improved highlighting: Partial matches will now be highlighted while the user is typing so that they can understand which part of the autocomplete prompt matches the string they have typed. Previously, the system only highlighted matches of complete words. Now if a user typed, “lis,” the autocomplete prompt “Listings Verifier” would appear partially highlighted based on the matching characters.

As a result, autocomplete prompts in Query Suggestions are now more dynamic, which provides a better experience and instills confidence in the intelligence of the overall search experience for the end-user.

This feature was automatically enabled in all Sandbox and Production accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

We’ve made several incremental, but meaningful improvements to various parts of the Search platform that will enable users to more easily build impactful search experiences, including:

• Improved page load speed of the Experience Training table.
• Updated buttons for entering the Merchandiser in Test Search to make it more clear where to enter to modify the appearance of search results.
• Updated “Random Relevance” sort criteria to treat “Relevant” as an additional, separate filter. Users now have the option to include relevance as a filter to random sort criteria, whereas before, random sorting was bundled with the “Relevance” filter and lacked the ability to be separated. Existing configurations using “Random Relevance” will be automatically updated to use “Relevance” followed by “Random”, and will have no impact on their search behavior.
• Popular query filtering will now automatically filter out queries containing Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack tags. This will prevent XSS queries from appearing in popular queries if attempted multiple times.
• We’ve added a new configuration property called popularQueriesBlacklistRegex, which allows you to define regular expression patterns that should be blacklisted from popular query suggestions.
• We’ve released new model versions for Italian and German embeddings that improve the quality of semantic search and clustering in those languages.
• We’ve improved clustering accuracy with the ability to now generate clusters that are closer to the “optimal customer size” for each individual business, instead of previously, using similar parameters for all businesses.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Search Platform: Key Updates & Improvements (early access).

In the Fall ‘22 Release, Clustering was introduced in four new languages: Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. As of this January Release, Clustering for Italian is now available as well.

Clustering helps you compare performance across different “clusters” of semantically-similar search terms. With Clustering Internationalization, administrators across the globe can now better understand search trends at scale.

For the latest information on availability of advanced search features in specific languages, check out this reference doc.

With the launch of Studio, your team can build fully customized websites without writing code. Studio is a visual editor that allows non-technical users to create, edit, preview, and publish websites. Since Studio is built on the same infrastructure that coders use, developers, business users, and content editors can easily collaborate in building websites.

Studio will open a world of new possibilities for how your team creates web content. Previously with Yext’s Page Builder, you could create SEO landing pages with drag and drop modules (commonly referred to as ‘What You See Is What You Get’, or WYSIWYG), but customization of these pages was limited.

With Studio, you have full control over authoring website components, designing content layouts, and editing styling systems. What’s more, any updates in the Knowledge Graph seamlessly flow to your website after publishing with no additional effort.

Studio is not only far more intuitive and gives non-technical users more flexibility to create custom websites, but it also leverages the same Pages infrastructure that developers use.

Studio provides you with a few key benefits:

1. Websites created in Studio profit from state-of-the-art technologies, such as static site generation, to help ensure superior speed and SEO performance.
2. Both developers and content editors/designers can better collaborate on projects since websites authored in Studio are compiled to React code.
3. Developers can provide as much or as little configuration as needed to downstream users to ensure flexibility, while also ensuring brand harmony across different websites.

Editor’s note: Yext will continue development of Studio based on feedback from beta testers. As a result, we cannot commit to a date when Studio will transition out of beta and become eligible for general availability.

The Directory Manager UI helps you programmatically construct a directory of entities and relationships in your Knowledge Graph, based on a set of configurable logic. You can use the Directory Manager to quickly generate the entities needed to represent your brand’s data model, whether it be for a locations directory website, e-commerce catalog, or healthcare network.

One challenge with maintaining a directory is keeping it up-to-date; some data models have hundreds, or thousands, of intricate relationships, which are difficult to keep in lockstep as entities are updated. The Directory Manager not only helps you construct relationships in your graph, but it also actively maintains the logical hierarchy of relationships in response to entity updates.

Once your directory is constructed, you can easily leverage the data in a website or search frontend experience, seamlessly providing information about your entities and their relationships with incredible performance.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Directory Manager UI (early access).

Yext now supports local development URLs that exactly match URLs in your production environment, making it easier to test links in your web application.

With this release, the CaC API will now support the ability to delete Pages resources. This will allow users to control sites and domains without using the UI for at scale use-cases. Yext strives to enable fleet management of thousands of websites and this additional functionality further facilitates API control for Pages functionality.

Yext Analytics has been testing out a solution from Cloudflare to detect and filter out malicious bot traffic from customer analytics data. Cloudflare outperforms our previous tool in this regard, and we will switch over to use the new tool on April 1, 2023. As a result, accounts may see a visible decrease in their customer analytics data due to fewer bot events being logged. Accounts can now expect to see an even more accurate representation of their analytic events and customer behavior data.

In the Fall ’22 Release, we announced that in order to improve the way users can organize and manage Entity History within the Yext platform, we are deprecating the existing Activity Log screen in Spring ’23. We are replacing it with Entity History via the Logs API and a platform UI, and any existing links to the Activity Log will now redirect to the Entity History UI.

We will be deprecating our current conversion tracking approach in favor of a new and improved system. In the future, we will introduce a new universal analytics event model that will better represent the range of analytics events that can occur across different industries, demonstrating the full view of user behavior so that accounts can more accurately optimize their business strategies. Additionally, the new system will not rely on 3rd party cookie tracking, as Google plans to deprecate cookie tracking within the next year.

We expect to fully deprecate our current system by the end of 2023. The official deprecation date will be announced in a future release. Accounts that currently use Conversion Tracking can continue to track conversions with those associated metrics until the deprecation date.

Yext no longer supports outdated Instagram and Foursquare Analytics. These Instagram and Foursquare metrics and dimensions have already been deprecated, and users will no longer be able to access or track these outdated actions in Yext at a future release.

Outdated Instagram metrics and dimensions deprecated:

• HASHTAGS (metric)
• INSTAGRAM_POST_COUNT (metric)
• INSTAGRAM_CONTENT_TYPE (dimension)

Note: Metrics for the new Instagram integration are still available in the Social API, and are planned to be added to Report Builder with a future release.

Foursquare metrics and dimensions deprecated:

• FOURSQUAREDAILYCHECKINS (metric)
• FOURSQUARECHECKIN_TYPE (dimension)
• FOURSQUAREAGE (dimension)
• FOURSQUAREGENDER (dimension)
• FOURSQUARETIME (dimension)

This release we’ve added FTP/SFTP File Pickup as a new source in Connectors. Now, users can build Connectors that pull files from their server into the Knowledge Graph at a regular cadence — as frequent as hourly — to ensure that their data in Yext is always the most up-to-date. Using Yext’s advanced transform library, these Connectors can be configured to automatically clean and format data from files picked up from FTP/SFTP servers as they are ingested into the Knowledge Graph.

These enhancements will contribute to a more efficient and user-friendly data management experience, as users can accomplish even more, all in Connectors.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: FTP/SFTP Connector Source (early access).

In this release, we have made updates to the Data Connectors Overview Table to make it easier to view and manage existing Connectors in your account. We now support:

1. Search, filtering, and sorting on all Connectors in your account
2. Running a Connector directly from the Overview Table
3. Viewing which Connectors in your account (if any) are in progress

This update will make it easier to find and navigate to a specific Connector for accounts with many different Connectors.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Connectors Overview Table Updates (early access).

With support for Function on a Row Transforms in the Spring ’23 Release, the Connectors framework is more powerful than ever before.

Our existing Function Transform is intended to be executed on a single cell at a time. Now, with our new Function on a Row Transform, users can transform an entire row of cells all at once in a given function invocation. The ability to send multiple columns as inputs, and return multiple columns as outputs (e.g. API response data) will enable users to build more flexible and complex transformations.

For example, imagine a user wants to store a complete product URL that merges the base URL and slug returned from the source data — but, some of the products don’t provide direct slugs, in which case other available data should be used to generate the URL (e.g. product SKU). With this new transform, users could write a function to generate these full URLs variably, using either slugs or other available data.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Advanced Function Transform in Connectors (early access).

With this new feature, users will be able to easily duplicate a column of data in the Connector. This new feature will be helpful to users when:

1. The data both directly maps to a field value in the Knowledge Graph, and contributes to the value of another field that needs to be created via transforms
2. The same data should be mapped to two different fields on an entity

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Duplicate Column Transform (early access).

With this release, we have added new functionality to Connectors which allows users to optionally clear field values if the value in the dataset being processed is blank.

Prior to this update, entity field values could not be cleared via a Connector Run, despite the value from in the dataset being blank. This meant that if a field value was currently populated in the Knowledge Graph, but the data from the Connector run for that field was blank, the existing field data in the Knowledge Graph would remain unchanged, rather than be cleared.

With this update, we have added functionality to choose per field mapping whether ingesting a blank value via the Connector will clear the field if a current value exists, or ignore the blank value to preserve the current field value of the existing entity in the Knowledge Graph.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Clearing Field Values via Connectors (early access)

We have added a new Connector API endpoint so users can retrieve information about any given Connector run via the API. This endpoint, (with the addition of an update to the /trigger endpoint to return the Run ID of the initiated run) enables automated monitoring of a Connector’s progress and final result. The endpoint will return information such as a run’s status and entity counts, so developers can easily automate sequencing Connector runs or any action that is dependent on a Connector’s result.

Yext now supports notifications for Connector runs. This new notification sends an email and/or in-platform alert to users so they can quickly know the status of their Connectors — especially for those running on a schedule or via Push requests — without manually checking the Connector Summary screen.

Users can optionally filter the notifications based on the following criteria:

• Run status such as failed or completed
• Entity count of a type (e.g., notifications for runs with a certain number of entities failed, created, updated, or deleted)

For example, if you have a Connector that is set to run on a regular cadence, you can configure a notification for runs with a failed entity count greater than 0. With this feature, you are able to easily monitor errors and take action if needed, in real-time.

To turn on this feature in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Connector Run Notifications (early access).

In addition to populating category data to the base list for Yext Categories, users now have the ability to set Category Overrides within the Connectors framework.

For example, users can pull in their Google Categories (via the Google Business Profile native source in the Connector) and directly populate/map to their Google Category Overrides. This ensures that any subsequent changes to the base Yext Categories do not impact the user’s verification with Google when it comes to category assignment.

This feature was automatically enabled in all accounts, so you can start taking advantage of it today.

To ensure a more clear and intuitive developer experience, we are refreshing our API Domain Naming Conventions. Previously, we organized our APIs in three groups: Knowledge API, Admin API, and Live API. As of Spring ’23 release, our APIs are now organized in two groups: Management API and Content Delivery API, available at api.yextapis.com and cdn.yextapis.com, respectively.

Management API refers to endpoints used for managing Yext accounts and includes all existing Knowledge API endpoints, Agreements API (formerly, Admin API), and all existing Configuration as Code endpoints.

Content Delivery API refers to endpoints that are used to create consumer-serving experiences. This group will encompass all existing Live API and Content API.

With our new API organization, we’ve also renamed Admin API to Agreements API (under the Management API group) to better reflect which customers use these endpoints. All together, these changes will help future-proof the Yext platform, ensuring developers can easily build with Yext for many years to come.

For more detail regarding these changes, please read our updated documentation.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: New API Domain Naming Conventions (early access).

This release we’ve added a dedicated Function Logs UI and made these logs available to query in the Logs API. Now users can see all function executions in their account, invoked by any Calling System such as Pages, Function Hooks (Preview), or Connectors. This will significantly benefit developers building with custom functions as they monitor and troubleshoot their Yext experiences.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Functions Logs (early access).

In the Fall ‘22 Release, we introduced new functionality that allows users to schedule license unassignments and view the list of pending updates within a dedicated UI. This January, we’ve expanded upon this feature to officially provide users a way to manage licenses via API.

The License API will enable users to take the following actions on existing entities:

• Assign licenses across product areas (i.e., Listings and Reviews)
• Execute immediate license removals
• Schedule future license removals (and cancel if desired)
• View a list of all active license packs on the account
• View a list of all licenses that have been assigned to a specific entity

To turn on this feature in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Spring ‘23: Managing Licenses via API (early access).

We made updates to our rate limiting system to further strengthen the availability and reliability of our API-based services. These enhancements will be gradually rolled out to users between the January ‘23 Release and Spring ‘23 Release dates.

The following improvements will help police traffic and disallow large bursts from single businesses:

• Starting hourly quota window on the first request, instead of at the top of the hour
• Implementing a new algorithm which better protects against activity spikes

Note: This will not impact any existing integrations. For more details and developer guidance, please visit our reference documentation.