Understand IP Filtering | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• Understand internal and external IP addresses
• Learn how to filter internal IP addresses out of Analytics reporting

Understanding internal and external IP addresses

After launch, it’s important to monitor queries to continually improve the experience. However, many queries will come from Administrators and internal client users, effectively blurring what real consumers are searching for and making it harder to know where to prioritize updates.

To address this, you can filter search traffic based on IP address. An IP address serves two main functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. In the next section, you’ll learn how to add both your IP address (i.e. the Administrator’s IP address) as well as the client’s IP addresses to the platform such that it identifies any Search traffic from those IP addresses as “Internal.”

It’s also important to note, in addition to IP Filtering, all users who log into the platform (either client or Administrator) will be tracked as “Internal” via Cookie. For Yext employees, this applies to all Search Experiences. For users at the business (i.e. clients and Administrators working on their behalf), this will only apply if the account’s Business ID matches the Business ID associated with the Search Experience.

How to filter internal IP addresses out of Analytics reporting

To filter internal IP addresses out of Analytics reporting, navigate to Search > All Search Experiences > View Experience and select the “IP Filtering” screen under “Analysis”. Below the “IP Filtering” header, input your IP address and the client’s IP addresses (Yext IP addresses are automatically filtered out of reporting) using the syntax below:

{
 "ipFilters": [
    {
      "source": "client_name",
      "address": "IP_address"
    }
  ]
}

Once you’ve input the IP addresses to be considered “Internal” (and be filtered out of reporting), click “Save” at the bottom of the page. Any IP addresses added to this section will not update reporting historically - if you add a new IP address, reporting will only be updated moving forward (not for previous searches conducted by that user).

To help effectively manage the list of IP addresses, we recommend creating a spreadsheet with a column for ‘List of IPs (column A)’, ‘Source Name’ (column B - you only need to populate cell B2 with the client name), ‘Source Formula’ (column C), and ‘JSON to Copy’ (column D)’. It should look something like this: