We get a lot of questions about our address suppression feature here at Yext, specifically about its core functionality. It’s not always clear when to use that feature, who should be using it, what happens when it’s enabled, and (perhaps most important) what happens to your listings when you leave Yext. This post will cover that info as well as other details about the address suppression feature that you need to know before taking on service-area business clients.
The first and most imperative question you have to ask this client is, “What do you do?” This might seem rather an obvious question, but how the client answers affects whether or not Yext can support address suppression for their purposes.
Address suppression is meant for clients that may have a “home base” but whose primary offering is a service that they go to the clients’ location to accomplish. This would include services such as maids and housekeeping, locksmiths, painters, and other such service providers. These businesses may have a brick-and-mortar location, but it’s a warehouse or residential address that customers shouldn’t see for whatever reason. In addition, mobile businesses (such as ice cream trucks, food carts, and sample sales) may wish to suppress their address and use the Yext Featured Message to display their location of the day. In the case of these businesses, the address suppression feature allows them to hide their physical address and select a service area or geolocation marker instead.
Where this breaks down is when your client runs an online-only business, such as a retailer with no physical storefront, and you try to list on Yext. Because Yext’s core product offering is a listing management tool, Yext can’t support businesses without a physical presence. If your prospective client runs an Etsy shop and brings you on, your service offering to them cannot include Yext.
On the surface, address suppression sounds pretty straightforward: Yext suppresses the address you list with us when we send it to our publisher network. The reality is, our relationships with our publishers are way more complicated than that, with each publisher handling suppression per their own standards. We’ll go over how the address is displayed on each site, what the map marker indicates, how the URL is affected, and what happens when a potential customer clicks for “directions” to the business.
Each publisher seems to suppress the address a little differently. In broad strokes, here is how our publishers break down:
| Street Address Suppressed * City/State suppressed also | Suppression Not Supported |
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Note that there are some publishers who hide the entire address. For example, this 8Coupons listing includes a business name and phone number but no address information.
By contrast, an address with just the street portion suppressed will look like this EZLocal listing, where the city, state, and zipcode are still displayed — both on the page and in the URL.
Last, when address suppression isn’t available, the publishers will be noted as “Unavailable” under the Listings tab of the client dashboard. The exception to this is Yelp, which due to the nature of the integration, may occasionally “go live” — you may need to manually opt out of Yelp to ensure your client’s address remains suppressed correctly.
Many of our publishers include a map on their listing pages. It’s important to know what the map pin indicates for your business, especially as it varies from publisher to publisher.
Recall that you can manually pin the map to a custom point when you set up a client location. However, not all publishers accept this new latitude/longitude value. The addition of address suppression impacts this as well; some publishers will center the map on the custom point you have chosen, while others will center the map on the address’s true city. For example, if you’re in Oak Lawn, IL, but you serve the greater Chicago, IL, area, you might have moved your business pin into the Chicago boundary. However, some publishers will center the map on Oak Lawn instead.
To differentiate between the two outcomes, we’re separating this behavior into different columns. In the table below, “City Centerpoint” means that the suppressed address’s City/State will be used to center the map pin. (To use our earlier example, your pin will be in Oak Lawn, IL.) By contrast, “Pin Centerpoint” means the map pin points to the custom pin you have indicated in the dashboard. We also note publishers where the map is removed completely, or where we expect that publishers are using the suppressed street address to center the pin under, “Address is Centerpoint.”
| City Centerpoint | Pin Centerpoint | Map is removed | Address is Centerpoint |
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We have one publisher where clicking on “Directions” will display the suppressed address as the destination address. The publisher this affects is WhitePages.
There’s plenty of documentation about what happens to a listing when Yext is canceled. To recap: the usual data-validation process is followed, with listings displaying information culled from a variety of sources weighted by authority, recency, and corroboration.
The tricky part comes from the address suppression component. The bottom line is this: Yext cannot guarantee that the address will continue to be suppressed after cancellation. While many publishers simply revert a listing to its previous version, this is not universal behavior. Nor should you assume that the displayed address will remain as it appears on all publishers; it’s very possible that the suppressed address will be exposed.
If you choose to cancel your Yext PowerListings subscription, you will need to manually claim each of your extant listings and ensure that the client’s information does not become exposed. You may wish to opt out of publishers on a rolling basis, to give you and your client time to take over the management of the listing over a protracted period rather than en masse.
Regardless, once a customer cancels PowerListings, Yext relinquishes control of the listing. It is up to the individual publishers to determine what they do with our data. Yext stops monitoring the listing once a client stops subscribing to PowerListings.
If you have further questions about address suppression, please ask in the forums or contact Partner Support directly at partnersupport@yext.com or at 1-888-236-3930.
All information in this post was adapted and expanded from the following support articles: