Build on Yext

Authors: Nick Oropall, Senior Manager, Platform Product Marketing
Product: Answers
Blog Date: September 2021

Yext gives your organization a platform to help deliver AI search experiences based on natural language.

Leveraging AI, Yext organizes your brands' data and makes the answers accessible for customers, employees, and partners.

With the Yext platform you can build AI search solutions for marketing, support, ecomm, workplace, and anything else your developers or administrators can dream up.

Build Your Graph with Our Connectors Framework

Yext's Data Connectors framework makes it as easy as possible to bring all your data into a single platform and build your own knowledge graph. It provides a single easy-to-use tool where users can view and choose from all possible data input options.

Once you've chosen your data source, Yext is able to extract the data, transform it to a format that is supported by the platform, and load it into the Knowledge Graph.

Yext supports a number of sources, and the list is constantly growing. This includes APIs, a web crawler, file upload, webhooks, 3rd party apps, and more.

Knowledge Graph

The foundation of your natural language experiences starts with how your data is stored. That's why Yext experiences are built on a Knowledge Graph, your own brain-like database that is structured with real-world entities and their relationships.

Building out your own Knowledge Graph is easy with a ton of integration choices like our Web Crawler, Connectors, bulk upload tools, and APIs.

Once your data is in the graph you can use built-in or custom entities to structure your data in the way that best fits your brand and your use cases.

Multi Algorithm AI Search

Natural language search is critical to a modern digital experience. It can drive a better user experience as well as increase engagement, decrease support costs, and drive incredibile insights.

Your data lives in different environments, in different structures, and no single algorithm can search every structure.

Yext supports a modern search experience with our multi-algorithm approach. We've trained unique algorithms specifically built for searching:

  • Structured Data, like locations, events, products, jobs, doctors, or advisors
  • Semi-Structured Data, like frequently asked questions
  • And Unstructured Data, such as Blogs, News Articles, Press Releases, Bios, Product Manuals, or Help Articles

Build Highly Performant Pages that Scale

Yext's Pages technology allows developers to build highly performant pages that scale — using the power of the Yext platform.

A modern JAMstack developer experience, combined with a familiar git-based workflow allows you to build webpages your way, and streaming static generation allows you to build pages in record time.

Though the page building experience is purpose-built for developers, the Yext platform fosters collaboration with a point-and-click UI for content updates, new deployments, rollbacks, and more.

Get started with the Yext Sites Developer Preview.

Showcase your brand’s data on a network of third-party publishers

In addition to the first-party experiences you can build on the Yext platform, Yext also boasts a network of ~200 third-party publishers to push your brand's data to.

Powered by dual-sync direct API integrations, you can showcase rich content including the basics like name/address/phone number, as well as images, publisher-specific fields, and more.

Engage your users & showcase feedback with reviews

Reviews are a critical source of feedback for your brand, a space to engage with your users, and an area that provides a significant impact on search.

Yext provides the tools to:

  • Monitor reviews, including Sentiment Analysis and Competitive Intelligence
  • Respond to reviews, using a number of dynamic & intelligent response methods
  • And Generate first-party reviews for your locations, people, products, and more

Robust and Flexible Development Experience

The Yext platform provides a development experience built for stakeholders of all roles, including developers, administrators, and business users.

Features such as a Command Line Interface and Configuration as Code support your technical users while business users are able to easily update your search experiences using a low-code interface.

For businesses looking to create a completely custom frontend for their search experiences Yext also provides a number of developer tools including SDKs, a CLI, and an API.

Additionally, Yext integrates into Git based development flows, so your developers can work in an environment that they are comfortable with.

Develop your own search Apps or install them from the App Directory

While the Yext platform supports endless customization, we also provide functionality to build your own apps for packaged search experiences, or install pre-built Apps from our App Directory.

For example, as a healthcare organization you can get started with a Healthcare app pre-loaded with custom entities, relationships, taxonomies, and search configurations. Or you can build your own custom app completely tailored to meet your needs and use cases.

The Hitchhikers Training Platform and Community

In addition to our technology, Yext is dedicated to providing your team with all of the resources they need to build amazing search experiences.

Yext's Hitchhikers program combines a set of best-in-class developer tools with a community of experts.

From robust documentation, to quickstart guides, to serf-serve training, Hitchhikers provides everything your developers need to build on Yext.

Security & Compliance

Your data security is our top priority at Yext. When you trust us with your data, we take that seriously.

Our regulatory compliance includes SOC2, HIPAA, PCI, SEC 17a, and FINRA 2210. We continuously invest in enterprise-class security features, compliance, and best practices in order to help you answer your customers' questions safely.

Data Centers Around the World

When it comes to your data we take great care in how and where we store it.

Yext has data centers around the world in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacfic regions, hosted by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and INAP.

What can you build

Here are just a few of the amazing solutions you can build on the Answers platform.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg, the Yext team is constantly making the platform more powerful and nothing excites us more than when our clients and partners use the platform to build something we've never even imagined.

For everything you need to get started building on the Yext platform check out the Hitchhikers self-paced training and documentation.

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