Yext Opens Scout Visibility Intelligence to Partners with the Launch of MCP and API

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2026--

Yext, Inc. (NYSE: YEXT), the enterprise agentic marketing platform, today announced the launch of Scout MCP and Scout API, opening its visibility and competitive intelligence infrastructure to global partners and positioning Yext as the data layer for an agentic marketing era.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260518413611/en/

Scout is the most comprehensive visibility intelligence dataset available for local businesses, analyzing 10 billion signals monthly across four AI models for over 12 million business locations and surfacing 150 visibility metrics across 20 competitors in every scan. That dataset is now available to partners through two paths: Scout MCP, which provides conversational, no-build-required access, and Scout API, which enables fully custom, white-labeled product experiences built on the same infrastructure powering Yext's own platform.

The market context

AI is replacing the execution work that local digital marketing agencies have built their businesses on. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's 2025 Empowering Small Business report, 58 percent of small businesses now use generative AI – more than double the rate in 2023.

As AI commoditizes content generation and publishing, the businesses best positioned for this transition will be the ones who can deliver strategic guidance grounded in data that their clients cannot get on their own.

Scout MCP and API are built to be that foundation, giving partners access to the visibility and competitive intelligence they need to extract those insights and bring them to every client conversation.

"The role of a local digital marketing agency has always been the same: help small businesses compete and win in their markets," said Christian Ward, Chief Data Officer at Yext. "With Scout MCP, local digital marketers can now effortlessly access visibility and competitive intelligence that would have been impossible to assemble five years ago. That's a different level of conversation entirely."

“As AI reshapes local marketing, access to differentiated data becomes the real competitive advantage,” said Brock Berry, CEO & Co-Founder of AdCellerant, a global digital marketing services company. “What makes Scout compelling is the depth of visibility into AI models, search performance, and competitor analysis. We believe partners will be able to build entirely new client experiences and workflows on top of Scout MCP that simply weren’t possible a few years ago.”

What Scout MCP and API enable

Partners using Scout can walk into any client or prospect meeting and show that business exactly where it stands against its competitors in AI and local search. The insights span four areas:

• Competitive intelligence and prospecting: Provide clients or prospects with a live view of exactly where they're losing to competitors across AI and local search.

• AI citation and model analysis: Know which AI models are citing a brand, how often, and in what context and how that compares to the competitors including sentiment and themes.

• SEO and AI search performance: Track how brands appear across both traditional and AI search surfaces, with 150 visibility metrics across 20 competitors per scan.

• Prioritized action recommendations: Surface the highest-impact fixes, with a 90-day growth plan and paid media guidance built for prospect meetings and upsell conversations.

Partners can access Scout through the UI for a ready-built experience, through the MCP for conversational access without any development work, or through the API for fully custom, white-labeled products. The same dataset powers all three.

Built on Yext’s infrastructure, maintained by Yext

This announcement is part of Yext’s ongoing commitment to provide solutions our partners need, including acting as the core intelligence layer as infrastructure they can build on. Partners who build on Scout inherit Yext's ongoing platform development without maintaining their own data pipelines. Every improvement Yext makes to Scout flows directly to partners, regardless of which access path they use. Scout MCP and API join Yext's Management API and Content Delivery API as part of a connected ecosystem built for how agencies need to operate today.

Scout MCP and API are available for early access starting today. Partners interested in access should visit yext.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains “forward-looking statements” including, without limitation, statements regarding Yext’s expectations, beliefs, intentions, and strategies regarding Scout MCP and Scout API, including expected benefits to Yext’s partners. These statements are based upon current beliefs and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements, including, among others, the risk that the features and benefits described in this release are not realized as expected, and whether all of the offerings and capabilities will be available as and when stated in this release. All forward-looking statements are based on information available to Yext on the date hereof, and Yext assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Yext

Yext (NYSE: YEXT) is the enterprise agentic marketing platform. Built on the world's most comprehensive structured data platform for local businesses, Yext gives brands and their partners the visibility intelligence to win every moment of discovery – across AI and traditional search. Yext's API-first architecture connects structured data to APIs, MCP servers, and generative interfaces, so partners and developers can build purpose-built experiences on the same infrastructure powering Yext's own products. Thousands of brands and digital marketing partners in financial services, healthcare, retail, hospitality, and food rely on Yext to manage, measure, and optimize visibility at scale. For more information, visit yext.com.

Yext Scout is the most comprehensive visibility intelligence dataset available for local businesses. That dataset is now available to partners through two paths: Scout MCP and Scout API.

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV and the co-founder of artificial intelligence company Anthropic will launch the pontiff’s first encyclical on May 25, a document on the care of human dignity in the era of AI, the Vatican said Monday.

Anthropic has billed itself as the AI company that puts safety and risk-mitigation at the forefront of its research. As a result, the presence of Anthropic's Christopher Olah at the Vatican is significant, and suggests that the U.S. pope's position on AI will become a new flashpoint with the Trump administration.

In February, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology and imposed other major penalties for refusing to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of its AI technology. Anthropic is currently suing the administration, which it has accused of retaliating against it illegally because of its attempt to impose limits on how its AI technology can be deployed.

Leo, who has made AI a priority of his young pontificate, is greatly concerned about AI in warfare and has called for monitoring of how the technology is used.

The pope’s presence at the launch of the document, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) is also significant, since such presentations are usually conducted in the Vatican press room with a few selected officials and invited guests who answer reporters questions about the document.

This time, the Vatican is bringing out an all-star cast for a formal launch in the main Vatican auditorium: Two of its top cardinals, doctrine chief Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and development chief Cardinal Michael Czerny, will be the main presenters. Olah will be among the lay speakers, along with theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo.

The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, will offer a conclusion and Leo will make a speech and provide a final blessing, the Vatican said.

Leo signed the document May 15, 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed his most important encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” or Of New Things. That document addressed workers’ rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway.

It became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought, and the current pope has already cited it in relation to the AI revolution, which he believes poses the same existential questions that the Industrial Revolution posed over a century ago. The new encyclical is expected to place the AI question in the context of the church’s social teaching, which also covers issues such as labor, justice and peace.

Anthropic chief Dario Amodei had worked at OpenAI before he and a group quit to form Anthropic in 2021, disagreeing with OpenAI chief Sam Altman about AI safety. The newer company promised a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms aim to build.

In a recent post on its website, Anthropic wrote about the U.S.-China competition in AI and the threats of the technology falling into the hands of authoritarian regimes. It warned that the U.S. and democratic allies must continue to lead on AI development and impose rules and norms on its spread, to prevent China and other authoritarian regimes from deploying it as a weapon of repression and surveillance.

Earlier this year, privately held Anthropic said its valuation grew to $380 billion, positioning itself with its chatbot Claude alongside rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with his AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Pope Leo XIV delivers his blessing as he recites the Regina Coeli noon prayer from the window of his studio overlooking St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, May 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Pope Leo XIV delivers his blessing as he recites the Regina Coeli noon prayer from the window of his studio overlooking St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, May 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)