What happens when a Listings subscription is cancelled – Yext Help

This article explains what happens to business listings and information after someone has elected to not renew their Yext Listings subscription, and provides additional information on how Yext integrates with various publishers in the Publisher Network.

How Yext Integrates

Yext has developed direct integrations with numerous publishers. Generally, these integrations leverage a public or private API (Application Programming Interface) hosted by the publisher. These APIs give our platform methods to programmatically create, update, and suppress listings within the publisher’s system.

When our platform calls these methods, we also pass credentials that let the publisher know the request comes from Yext. This allows requests we make on a client’s behalf to receive special treatment, which can vary from publisher to publisher (e.g., more generous rate limiting or the ability to receive publisher analytics).

Publishers Leverage Multiple Data Sources

For publishers, being comprehensive can be just as important as being accurate. They want to make sure they have data for as many locations as possible so they can surface the best information to customers. While Yext is often the single largest direct source of data for a publisher, there are other data sources like data aggregators that help publishers fill in the gaps and cover locations not managed by Yext. When we send listing information to a publisher via API this is also a signal to ignore those other data sources for that listing, since data from Yext comes directly on behalf of the business.

Cancellation Behavior

When a client cancels their subscription to Yext Listings, we simply stop calling the publisher APIs on the client’s behalf. For some publishers we do need to make one final call to tell them the listings are no longer managed through Yext. This is a signal to stop sending Yext analytics for these listings, remove the “Owner Verified” attribution logo, and allow someone other than Yext to manage the listings.

We never send old data or attempt to revert listings. Beyond being a terrible business practice, doing this would jeopardize our relationship with publishers. Hurting a publisher’s data quality hurts their business. In the absence of Yext or another provider with API integrations actively managing a listing, the data for each listing may change over time as the publisher relies more heavily on other non-direct data sources, including aggregators and crowdsourced user-generated content. Since each publisher takes a different approach, this will happen at a varied pace and could lead to disparity of data points from publisher to publisher.

The situation described above is the default state of how data changes over time within many publishers. In the absence of someone, like Yext, explicitly keeping the data updated and accurate via a direct API integration, most publishers will look to a combination of third-party data sources in an attempt to stay up to date. Unfortunately, there is no one-time permanent fix for a listing.

Publisher Nuances

Based on our knowledge of their systems, we know a handful of publishers store Yext data separately from their other data sources. In these isolated cases, if Yext is canceled, these publishers will stop looking at Yext data and rely on their other data sources.

To help with this, Yext now actively encourages publishers to continue using the final snapshot of our data post-cancellation. All listing data including rich content like photos and even duplicate suppression records can be used by publishers even after cancellation. This does not guarantee that publishers will continue using that content, however. The decision about what data or content to display after Yext is removed from the equation will always remain up to the publisher itself.