AI-Powered Search: Chris Brownlee on Conversational AI & Visibility

1. What role does conversational AI play in transforming how users interact with digital platforms?

The way customers discover your brand or your products and services is very different when it's done through conversational AI. The results are very specific.

For the last twenty years or so, customers typed a search query in Google, and that required them to chase down various links.

But now with conversational AI, you ask a question, and you get a pretty direct answer. Or you can refine your request in far more natural ways. It isn’t natural to have to ask for things like [jaguar speed -animal] , but it’s really easy to conversationally look for the exact information you are seeking just like you would with a person.

Even better, if you use these tools frequently, it starts to learn about you. It starts to know your preferences and provide even better answers tailored for you.

2. What are the key technical advancements behind Yext Scout’s AI-powered search?

As a marketer, AI-powered search is a black box. There is no dashboard to update your information. There are no metrics to measure your performance. So how does a Marketer survive in this new world?

AI Search and their LLM’s still need the web. The web and its data are the fuel that they run on. All of the information the LLM is sharing with your customers comes from the web.

With Yext, we are connected to more web publishers than any other solution in the market. We help brands manage their reviews and social presence across the web. We help brands firmly establish their 1st party websites as a source of truth. We do this really well.

And so what we can see now, and map out with Scout, is that your AI strategy is your Digital Presence strategy. We can show a marketer where their information is being picked up from and give them real actionable recommendations on how to improve their visibility.

3. What are the key benefits of integrating AI-driven search solutions into digital platforms?

AI search is still somewhat in its infancy. You know, there is the Mom test. Does my Mom use SearchGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot? No, not yet. But do I think she is far off? No, not at all.

This technology is getting baked into our everyday technology. My Mom has an iPhone. She uses Siri. Apple is baking OpenAI into their devices through Apple Intelligence - they are still honing it - but we are really close to crossing the chasm in my opinion. Taking advantage of agentic AI technology like Scout is how brands can put their best foot forward — or they risk getting left behind.

4. How does Yext Scout enhance user experience by understanding search intent?

Scout is really meant to be your AI search and competitive intelligence agent. It's for anyone looking to measure and optimize brand visibility and sentiment across both traditional and AI-driven search. Scout delivers a unified platform that delivers deep search insights, competitive benchmarking, and actionable recommendations, and all with a seamless execution in one place.

Unlike legacy SEO tools that only focus on Google and other traditional digital networks, Scout uniquely tracks AI-driven search presence, sentiments, and share of voice, and provides prioritized recommendations that can be deployed seamlessly from within the Yext platform.

5. What are the security and compliance considerations when adopting AI-driven search technologies?

LLMs and AI search agents are trained on everything that's found across the web. They crawl listings, reviews, first-party web content, social profiles, and more. Scout is helping you to know how you are already appearing in the public domain.

Which comes to the point: more than ever, it's important to have accurate, clear, and consistent data across your entire digital presence.

To illustrate further: with SearchGPT, there could be a small listings website that your brand is mentioned on — but that you're not active on, and the information there might be out of date. In AI search, this information could still get pulled up as a citation and thus give outdated or incorrect information to your customers.

It's incredibly important to have a tool like Scout and Yext with a knowledge graph that can take all of your data, manage it in a clean, consistent way, and push that information out in an accurate, consistent, and manageable way across the entire web. That gives you the best chance to show up in AI search.

6. What types of organizations can benefit most from Yext Scout’s capabilities?

Right now we have honed Scout to really help out multi-location businesses. Think of large franchises across verticals like Food & Beverage, Retail, Financial Services or Healthcare.

In Scout, we provide a map-like overview so these brands can really quickly see at a glance which locations are performing well, and where they can benefit from our recommendations. We provide all of the data to help them identify the problem spots, but with our deep data science expertise and massive depth of data, we can find the trends and opportunities that would be impossible for any one brand to find on their own.