For users that power Listings website URLs using Pages, Yext offers a first-class feature that keeps your Pages URLs in lockstep with your entities. This ensures that any time your Pages URLs are updated, the entities (and therefore Listings) are updated in real-time automatically.

Keeping this information in lockstep is crucial to ensure end-users always see consistent and brand-verified information.

The URL Writeback

Whenever a page is published or updated, Yext can be configured to automatically "write" that URL back to its corresponding entity profile.

• In the left section of the diagram, data from two entities is used to create pages.
• In the right section, once the pages are published to the web, each URL is written back to its corresponding entity profile. From there, you can map that data to the websiteUrl field for Listings.

URL Writeback Triggers

Writebacks are triggered in the following scenarios:

1. Deployment Publish to Production — occurs when you publish a deployment to production.

2. Trigger URL Change — occurs when the "Trigger Url Change" option is selected from your deployment.

3. Domain Reassignment — occurs when you reassign a different domain to your site. If a deployment is currently published to production, Yext will invoke a writeback for each entity page in your site.

4. Data Update — occurs when a page is regenerated in response to an entity data update. Each time a page in your production deployment is regenerated, Yext will invoke the URL writeback in the event the URL for that page changed.

Configuration

To configure URL writebacks, use the pageUrlField property within the config export of each stream template. For each page generated using a template, Yext will publish that page's URL to the provided field on each corresponding entity.

Note: You must be on Pages version 1.0.0 to use this property in your template configuration.

In the example below, the URL of each page based on the location.tsx template will be published to the c_pagesUrl field on each corresponding location entity:

// src/templates/location.tsx
export const config: TemplateConfig = {
  stream: {
    $id: "locations",
    filter: {
      entityTypes: ["location"],
    },
    fields: [
      "id",
      "name",
      "address",
      "mainPhone",
      "description",
      "slug",
    ],
    localization: {
      locales: ["en"]
    }
  },
  pageUrlField: "c_pagesUrl"
};

Validation Logic

Deployment Validation

If your repository has writebacks configured, Yext performs a validation check at deployment time. For each configured pageUrlField value, the validation checks that:

• The field is defined in your account.
• The field is enabled for each entity type used by the corresponding template.
• The field is a string or URL type field with a max length of 1024 or greater.
• The field's alternate language behavior is set to Overridable or Language Specific (applicable only if your template includes multiple language profiles).

• The field is not in use across multiple templates that write to overlapping sets of language profiles. This protects against "writeback thrashing" (see below).

  Each configured writeback can be thought of as the key/value pair <pageUrlField, [locales]>. For example:

  • If template-a.tsx (locales: en, es) has writebacks to c_pageUrl, then template-b.tsx (locales: en, es) cannot also write back to c_pageUrl — the locale sets overlap.
  • If template-b.tsx only used fr profiles, it could also write back to c_pageUrl, since <c_pageUrl, [en, es]> and <c_pageUrl, [fr]> have mutually exclusive locale sets.

If any of these conditions are not met, the deployment will fail.

Thrashing Validation

If multiple templates have overlapping entity scopes (i.e., they both publish to the same entity profile field), this can cause a writeback "thrashing" scenario — an infinite feedback loop where a URL writeback from one site triggers a writeback for another, repeating indefinitely.

To prevent this, Pages will fail your deployment if the same pageUrlField is configured for multiple templates that share the same underlying entity scope.

Activity & Error Monitoring

You can monitor writeback activity via the Data Updates page.

In the event of writeback failures, Pages will automatically list each activity that requires attention and provide helpful error messaging.