Authentication & Linked Accounts | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• An Overview of the Authentication process
• Which Listings require Authentication

Authentication Overview

The first step in the sync process is only relevant to a handful of publishers that maintain their own portal for business owners to log into, like Google, Facebook, and a few others. These publishers want to make sure that the Business Owner is giving Yext permission to access and manage the entity information for their site.

Not sure what Authentication means? You use authentication all the time whether you realize it or not! Have an Alexa? If you’ve ever connected your Spotify or Bank account to Alexa, you’re using authentication. Have a dating app? I’m sure you’ve used authentication to pull in pictures from your social media. Ever checked out using Paypal or Amazon instead of the e-commerce site’s native payment processing? You’ve authenticated your Paypal or Amazon to send those details in a secure way.

Authentication is used daily and there are official protocols that systems use to perform this type of authentication, the most common of which is OAuth 2.0. You can read more about how OAuth 2.0 works on the OAuth website , but rest-assured that it is a completely secure and reliable way of authorizing the exchange of data between two password-protected applications. When you authorize Yext to manage your data, the publisher will make a secret account access token available to Yext that we must use in order to make any updates or pull information from your account. If the access token expires or becomes invalid, Yext will lose access to your account and you must re-authenticate.

Which Publishers require Authentication?

The Publishers that require authentication include, but are not limited to:

• Google
• Facebook
• Delivery.com
• Eventbrite
• Eventful

Some publishers, such as Yelp, require authentication only for advanced features, like responding to reviews or social posting.

You can provide authentication in Yext via Linked Accounts. At any time, you can manage, view, disconnect or fix your Linked Accounts on the account level by going to Account Settings and clicking on Linked Accounts.

When you click to Link an Account, you’ll be entered into the OAuth 2.0 flow. This should look familiar:

Once you click Allow, you’ve given your Yext account and the publisher account permission to talk to one another.

After adding a Linked Account, you can assign that linked account to an entity on Entity Edit or in Entity Templates just like any other data field. You can also export this data in Entity Export, but you cannot upload via Entity Upload or API for security reasons.

Note

We strongly recommend storing linked accounts on any new entity templates so that you never have to think twice about assigning a linked account to new entities. If you have different linked accounts per brand, we recommend having a separate template per brand and combining the template with other important brand-wide data like Categories, Description, Featured Message, or other templatable fields. This way the information is always stored on the profile — whether you create that entity via Entity Add manually, via Entity Upload or via the API.

For Small Businesses, we will surface an Optimization Task for getting listings synced on popular sites that require Linked Accounts that will step you through the process for each entity.

For Enterprise brands, we will work with you to do this in bulk for your entities during your implementation process.

Sometimes, Linked Accounts become invalid. For example, if you change your password on the publisher’s portal, the authentication token we use to access your account information will expire and you’ll need to refresh the Linked Account. You can find any Listings that are Not Synced due to Linked Account issues by filtering on the All Listings page by Status Detail is Linked Account Issue.