Places Scout Acquired: Yext’s AI-Driven Future
Yext is rapidly redefining digital presence management through a strategic combination of AI-driven automation, competitive intelligence, and omnichannel customer engagement. The company’s latest acquisition of Places Scout, alongside its earlier purchase of Hearsay Systems and the launch of AI Review Generation, solidifies its position as a leader in helping multi-location businesses optimize visibility, outperform competitors, and engage customers more effectively.
As search and customer engagement continue to evolve—with AI-powered search agents, reputation management, and local search optimization shaping the landscape—Yext is ensuring that brands have the tools and insights to stay ahead.
Strengthening Competitive Intelligence: The Places Scout Acquisition
Announced yesterday, the company’s $20.3m acquisition of Places Scout further strengthens its competitive intelligence and local search benchmarking capabilities. Places Scout was an industry leader in local SEO and location intelligence, providing real-time, location-based insights to help brands: analyze search performance, track competitors and leverage AI-driven insights to refine local and national marketing strategies.
Michael Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext, had emphasized the impact of the acquisition: “Bringing Places Scout’s data into Yext immediately enhances our competitive intelligence capabilities, helping brands not just see where they stand, but know exactly what steps to take to outperform their competition.”
While Mark Kabana, CEO of Places Scout, echoed the sentiment: “With better data, you can make better decisions. Now, as part of Yext, we’re giving brands unmatched intelligence to adapt, compete, and lead in an AI-driven search world.”
This acquisition follows the company’s recent purchase of Hearsay Systems, reinforcing its mission to help businesses navigate AI-powered search, local discovery, and digital customer engagement.
Expanding Customer Engagement: The Hearsay Systems Acquisition
In June 2024, Yext announced its $125 million acquisition of Hearsay Systems, a global leader in digital client engagement for financial services. This move expanded Yext’s ability to provide compliance-driven engagement solutions across social media, text and voice communications , and AI-powered CRM integrations.
By integrating Hearsay’s capabilities with Yext’s AI-driven digital presence management, businesses were now enabled to manage all customer touchpoints within a single platform—ensuring consistency, compliance, and efficiency. At the time, First Horizon Bank, a long-time customer of both companies, was quoted as expressing enthusiasm for the move. “Combining Yext’s digital presence management with Hearsay’s compliance-driven client engagement will enhance our localized marketing efforts,” said Nick Burgess, VP of Social Media and Email Marketing at the bank.
Adding Hearsay into the fold, Yext concentrated on enabling businesses—especially in regulated industries—to expand customer engagement while maintaining compliance and brand integrity.
Automating Reputation Management: AI Review Generation
Beyond acquisitions, Yext continues to develop AI-powered tools in-house to help businesses manage their digital presence more efficiently. The company’s AI Review Generation feature, launched in October 2024, was designed to simplify and scale reputation management across 80 platforms, including Google and Facebook. Chris Brownlee, VP of Product Management at Yext, had explained the motivation behind the feature: “Managing their reputation can feel overwhelming, but we know just how crucial this is to building trust and driving conversions.”
Key features included automated review invitations, localized review generation URLs and AI-powered analytics to monitor review performance and optimize engagement. Early success was noted by Ochsner Health, reporting significant time savings in managing patient reviews..
Yext – A(i) Vision for the Future
With the acquisitions of Places Scout and Hearsay Systems, along with the AI Review Generation launch, Yext seems focused on delivering results at scale through a comprehensive AI-driven digital presence platform for multi-location brands. As Brownlee previously told StreetFight when describing Yext Social, “At this point we are really focused on optimizing the power of localization, creating posts at scale across thousands of locations without being [like a] cookie cutter.”
