From 12:57PM ET on Thursday, March 13, 2025, until 3:29PM ET on Thursday March 20, 2025, Yext needed to pause the export of data to Google Listings. This action was required to prevent our customers’ GBP entities from incorrectly requiring re-verification on Google due to problems discovered in Google’s system. Because of the exporting pause, it is possible that some entities’ Google listings were not updated for the duration of this incident.
The root cause was a change introduced by Google that caused a large number of previously cleared updates to Listings content to require re-verification of the entity on Google. Since the re-verification process can be tedious and time-consuming for our customers, Yext proactively decided to pause Listings exporting to Google until our monitoring indicated the problem was resolved.
When Yext re-enabled the exporters at 3:29PM ET on Thursday, March 20, 2025, we observed standard rates of listings entering a re-verification status. As such, we felt comfortable leaving Google exporting on to catch up on the backlog of updates that formed throughout the week. At 3:57PM ET on Friday, March 21, 2025, the backlog was fully processed, and all listings were restored to an ongoing sync state.
We communicated with our customers during the incident through Trust Site updates, an in-platform banner, and direct correspondence. We also maintained constant communication with Google to ensure we understood their latest attempts to resolve the issue. This allowed us to turn the Google Listings exporters back on as quickly as possible.
Going forward, we are working on better transparency by alerting our customers directly in our platform for these publisher-related issues. This will allow customers to stay up-to-date with the latest publisher information and have the best information available to handle these outages.