Listings publicly display information about a business's address, hours, services, and amenities across search engines, review sites, directories, voice assistants, maps, and anywhere else online that customers might be searching. Each result you see on Google Maps when you search "restaurants near me" is a listing.

Listings are made up of structured data. This data is organized information that allows listing content to be displayed in a standardized way across different websites and devices, and to be matched against specific parts of a search query.

For example, a search for "luxury hotel with free wi-fi in Lower Manhattan available tonight" can be broken down into:

• luxury: level of service
• hotel: category
• free wi-fi: amenity
• in Lower Manhattan: location
• available tonight: availability

A hotel listing with well-structured data can satisfy every part of that query. Good listings drive both online engagement and in-person visits. The easier it is to find information online for a certain business, the more likely consumers are to interact.

Publishers

Publishers are the apps, websites, and services that customers use to find listings. Common types include:

• Search engines (Google, Bing)
• Online directories (Yelp, TripAdvisor)
• Voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, Google Home)
• Maps and navigation (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, Uber)
• Social media (Facebook, Instagram)
• Industry-specific directories (OpenTable for restaurants, Zocdoc for healthcare)

All publishers have a search engine results page, an algorithm that determines results, and a preference for data that comes directly from the business.

Data that comes straight from the business representing a listing is called first-party data, while data fed into publishers from other sources is known as third-party data.

Long-Tail Publishers

Beyond major publishers like Google and Apple, many smaller publishers serve specific niches, regions, or industries. These are called long-tail publishers.

Long-tail publishers matter because Google and other major search engines consider the consistency of your data across all sources when ranking results. Inaccurate data on smaller publishers can affect your performance on larger ones.

How Yext Manages Listings

In Yext, listings are managed across two areas of the platform: the Knowledge Graph (where your business data is stored) and the Listings tool (where you connect to and manage publishers).

The Knowledge Graph and Entities

The data that powers your listings lives in the Knowledge Graph. In Yext, data objects are called entities, and each entity typically represents a single listing. An entity stores all the structured data, such as name, address, hours, photos, and more, that gets synced to publishers.

For example, a Google listing for "Galaxy Grill NYC" corresponds to a single entity for that location in the Knowledge Graph:

Because entity data powers your listings, it is important to structure your entities in the Knowledge Graph before launching Listings.

Yext Listings 

The Listings tool is a centralized place to view all connected publishers, sync updates, create new listings, manage duplicate listings, and monitor listing health across the Publisher Network.

How Yext Integrates with Publishers

Yext maintains connections with publishers through two types of integrations:

In the table below, you’ll see an overview of what dual-sync (two-way) publisher integrations and submission (one-way) publisher integrations can do:

	Dual Sync	Submission
	Two-way integration with publishers	One-way integration with publishers
Sync standard entity fields from the Knowledge Graph
Yext receives Listing Status data
Yext receives Analytics data
Yext receives Reviews data
Example Publishers	Google, Facebook, Yelp	Foursquare, Amazon Alexa

You can filter the Yext Publisher Network by integration type to see which publishers use each.

The Listings Sync Process

When Yext connects an entity to a publisher, it goes through two phases: the initial sync and the ongoing sync.

Initial Sync

The initial sync is the first time Yext syncs an entity's data to a publisher. It has three steps:

1. Authentication For certain publishers (Google, Facebook, Apple, Delivery.com, Eventbrite, Yelp), you link your account to Yext and authorize it to manage listing information. Some publishers require authentication for all features; others only for specific features like review monitoring.

2. Searching and Matching Yext searches the publisher for any existing listings that match your entity, using standard fields like name and address and some information that may be specific to certain industries (such as the NPI Number for healthcare professionals). This step, sometimes called scanning, avoids creating duplicate listings. Matches are the results that come back from the search step. The Yext algorithm scores each match based on data accuracy, verification status, and other factors.

3. Update or Create If a match is found, Yext updates it with entity data. If no match is found, Yext creates a new listing.

Ongoing Sync

After the initial sync, Yext maintains your listings in steady state. The ongoing sync essentially repeats the searching & matching and the update steps from the initial sync process. Whenever an entity is updated in the Knowledge Graph, Yext sends the update to each publisher. Yext syncs to only one listing per publisher per entity.

Update speed varies by publisher. You can filter by Update Time on the Publisher Network to see expected timeframes for each publisher.

Licenses

Licenses (also called subscriptions or feature packs) tell Yext which service should apply to which entities. Different Yext products each have their own license type, Listings, Pages, Reviews, and Social all use separate licenses.

Assigning a Listings license to an entity tells Yext to sync that entity to publishers on the Listings Publisher Network.

Before going live with Listings, all entities you want to launch must have a Listings license assigned. The types and quantity of licenses available in your account depend on your Yext subscription. Contact your Account Manager for details.

For steps on assigning licenses, see:

• Automatically Assign Licenses to Entities with a Saved Filter
• Assign Licenses to Entities 
• Unassign Licenses from Entities