Yext Q1 2026 Earnings Report

Yext EPS Results

• Actual EPS: N/A
• Consensus EPS: $0.11
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.05

Yext Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: N/A
• Expected Revenue: $107.59 million
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Yext Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q1 2026
• Date: 6/3/2025
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2025
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

Yext (NYSE:YEXT), Inc. organizes business facts to provide answers to consumer questions in North America and internationally. It operates Yext platform, a cloud-based platform that allows its customers to offer answers to consumer questions, to control the facts about their businesses and the content of their landing pages, and to manage their consumer reviews; and provides customers to update their information and content through its publisher network of maps, apps, search engines, intelligent GPS systems, digital assistants, vertical directories, and social networks, as well as professional services. The company's platform also enables its customers to centralize, control and manage data fields, including store information comprising name, address, phone number, and holiday hours; professional information, such as headshot, specialties, and education; job information consists of title and description; FAQs and other information. It serves various industries, such as healthcare, hospitality, food services, retail, and financial services. Yext, Inc. was incorporated in 2006 and is headquartered in New York, New York.

Yext Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Strong Q1 results: Yext outperformed its guidance on all key metrics in the first quarter and sees continued momentum heading into Q2.
• Yext Scout launch: The new AI-driven search analytics product has over 1,000 customers on its waitlist, with 45 already in open beta and early feedback indicating high value perception.
• Core business health is improving, with both gross and net retention rising alongside higher customer satisfaction and stronger value perception across Yext’s platform.
• Strengthened balance sheet via a new debt facility with BlackRock and accelerated share buybacks provide flexibility for organic reinvestment and opportunistic M&A.
• Management remains cautious on full-year outlook due to ongoing macroeconomic uncertainties despite current business momentum.

Presentation

[Operator]

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Yext Incorporated First Quarter Fiscal twenty twenty six Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Neil Zerdman. Please go ahead.

[Nils Erdmann, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations at Yext]

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Yext's first quarter fiscal twenty twenty six earnings conference call. With me today are CEO and Chair of the Board, Michael Walraf and CFO, Daryl Bond. During this call, we will make forward looking statements, including statements related to our future financial performance, statements regarding the expected effects of our recent acquisitions, expectations regarding the growth of our business, our outlook for the second quarter and full year fiscal twenty twenty our strategy and estimates of financial and operating metrics, capital expenditures and other indications of future opportunities as further described in our first quarter shareholder letter, which is available at investors.yext.com. These forward looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those related to Yext's growth, the evolution of our industry, our product development and success, our ability to integrate acquired businesses with ours, our management performance and general economic and business conditions.

[Nils Erdmann, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations at Yext]

These forward looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made, and we undertake no obligation to revise or update any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call. Further information on factors and other risks that could cause actual results to materially differ from these forward looking statements is included in our reports filed with the SEC, including in the sections titled Special Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements and Risk Factors in our most recent annual report on Form 10 ks for the year ended 01/31/2025, and in our earnings release and our shareholder letter that were both issued this afternoon. During the call, we refer to certain metrics, including non GAAP financial measures. Definitions of these non GAAP metrics and other operating metrics as well as reconciliations with the most comparable historical GAAP measures are available in the shareholder letter. I will now turn the call over to Mike.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Thanks, Nils, and thank you all for joining us today. As I hope you read in our shareholder letter and earnings release, we had a very strong Q1, outperforming our guidance on all metrics, and we see continued strength into Q2. A few things I'd like to highlight before we dive into your questions. First, fragmentation of the consumer search market continues to accelerate with the advancement of AI search. This trend elevates the importance for brands of managing digital visibility and it differentiates Yext's core products and provides fertile ground for our latest product release Yext Scout.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Second, our core business health is improving. We're seeing improvement in both gross and net retention, customer satisfaction and overall value perception across our platform. Third, the pace of innovation is advancing rapidly at Yext. We are speeding up our execution even as our profitability and efficiency grow, setting the table for a growth flywheel well into the future. And finally, we have the balance sheet and cash flow to further accelerate our growth while maintaining flexibility.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

This enables us to strategically reinvest in organic initiatives and pursue opportunistic investments, whether through M and A or partnerships that extend and enhance our business. I'm thrilled with the execution of our global team, who are bringing strong commitment to driving value for our customers even as the pace of change in our industry accelerates. And now we're happy to take any questions that you may have for us.

[Operator]

We will now begin the question and answer session. The first question is from Naved Khan with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

[Naved Khan, Managing Director at B. Riley Securities]

Great. Thank you very much. A couple of questions from me. Maybe just one on the scout update. It's good to see the waitlist up to 1,000 customers.

[Naved Khan, Managing Director at B. Riley Securities]

And I'm curious about the mix here in terms of, are you besides the interest from existing customers, are you also seeing a good number of new customers sign up for this product? And maybe as a related question, as you start to see, sort of more sales traction, how are you thinking about increasing sales headcount, for the rest of the year?

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Great. Hey, Naved. As far as the customers go, I think what we're seeing on the waitlist is a mix. So we see new we see existing customers, we see we also see new prospects and we also see new customers. So it's sort of all of the above there and that's driven by some of the demonstrations that we've had available for Scout since early April.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

As far as the sales headcount goes, I think we have room to run with our current headcount. I think we have opportunities to grow productivity, but we're going to continue to look at the demand universe, the market and determine when the right time is to add additional headcount. And we'll be opportunistic there because we're seeing plenty of positive signal, but we want to make sure that all of our sales folks have plenty of opportunity and that we don't get ahead of ourselves on that front.

[Naved Khan, Managing Director at B. Riley Securities]

Got it. And then maybe just staying on the on Scout, just talk about the velocity in terms of customers kind of of the sales cycle maybe shortening or not? And how should we be thinking about the product kind of becoming generally available to all the customers? How are you thinking about the timeline? Thanks.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Yes. So I think it's too early to say with any sort of certainty what the sales cycle will look like for this product. From what I can tell so far, I would expect that if anything, the sales cycle will be a bit shorter. It's an easier implementation. Core data is publicly available.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

And I think the value that our customers see, especially in light of what's going on in the market and the need to really understand the visibility around their brands with the rapid fragmentation that we're seeing. All of those things encourage me that this could be a shorter sales cycle product for most customers. As far as the look, I think that's reflected in the speed with which we've rolled the product out. So just as a reminder, we launched this product officially at our Analyst Day on April 2. That initial cohort was less than 10 development partners who we've been working with in advance of the what I would call a more open beta.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

As of yesterday. So there were an incremental, I believe it was 37 customers rolled out over the course of the last forty eight hours or so. And so I would describe where we are today with the product as an open beta that will be incrementally rolling out additional customers as we get those customers those beta customers lined up. We don't have a date yet for when we'll go full general availability, but I'm really confident that we have the capacity to roll out a lot of customers

[Naved Khan, Managing Director at B. Riley Securities]

Great. Thanks, Mike. I'll get back in the queue.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Thanks, David.

[Operator]

The next question is from Ryan MacDonald with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

[Ryan Macdonald, Senior Analyst at Needham & Company]

Hi, congrats on a great quarter, really strong results and a lot of positive momentum. Mike, it seems like that from reading the shareholder letter and hearing you speak right now, there's a lot of good things going on in the business, great Q1, good momentum to Q2. Scouts obviously seeing some really nice demand, hearsay, social, etcetera. But yet we still don't have a sort of full year top line outlook yet. I'm just curious, can you help us understand sort of how you're balancing sort of the enthusiasm and the momentum in the business right now versus maybe what you're seeing in the macro and sort of what's kind of creating the lingering caution, if you will?

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Yes. No, look, it's I think the lingering caution is two things, but probably primarily the macro, right? So it was interesting. I think I listened to all the software calls and I thought that it was interesting to listen to the March how the March quarters and the April potentially sounded a little bit different. While we don't have any direct impact in our business from tariffs and things like that, we are obviously well aware that businesses who do are thinking carefully about how they're expending dollars.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

At the same time, I think there's a competing tailwind here, which is it's not really deniable anymore that the brand discovery landscape is shifting enormously. We saw Google dip below 90% market share recently for the first time in a very long time. And candidly, that's not the best measure for two reasons. One is the that's really only measuring traditional search. And the second is that the fragmentation that's happening here isn't a zero sum game.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

So we think the fragmentation drives more search, not less search. So all of those things, I think, factor into the puts and takes around feeling really positive on the fact that this environment is very fertile for us. The commoditization pressure that we've talked about for years in our product, abates in a market where having the best digital visibility, brand visibility products is going to drive value perception. But we're always going to be mindful of the fact that there's a lot of uncertainty around the macroeconomic landscape. And so I think our overall outlook will remain conservative as long as that uncertainty exists.

[Ryan Macdonald, Senior Analyst at Needham & Company]

Helpful color. Maybe on Scout in the beta program. I'm just curious, what you're looking for within customers that have launched in the beta or from the development customers thus far. Are there any sample data points in terms of ROI generation that you can talk about? And then maybe perhaps based on what you're seeing or based on maybe the value you're seeing being delivered in the early days of Scout, is this evolving how you're thinking about monetization of the product when it eventually is generally available later this year or next year?

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Yes. So I mean, look, I think the development partner relationship is a little different than these initial beta launches. So the development partners are signing up for a product to experiment with a product that is not ready for a public launch. The launch that we've had over the last forty eight hours is really a public beta launch. And so we've been gating that and we're controlling how many customers are launched.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

But sitting today with something like 45 live customers, we're getting amazing feedback from the customers. I've personally sat through dozens many dozens of customer interviews and customer meetings, both demonstrations, but then also customers who are actively using the product. I can tell you that so far there's a 0% disinterest rate in the product and there's very high value perception both around the product, but also around how it demonstrates value of our other core existing products. So we talk a lot about Scout has over 150 non performance metrics that we're able to gather. Big chunks of those metrics are things around how are you distributing your listings information to create citations, both for traditional search and AI search, your page performance, your review performance, reputation performance.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

And so when we start demonstrating at the location level to our customers, how those metrics are contributing, any questions about the value of our listings product or our reviews product or our pages product or our social product, they start to fall by the wayside because you can see that that is the thing that differentiates you and you can see how you're outperforming your competition because of those things. So when I talk about kind of maybe the earliest benefit of the product is the anti commoditization pressure of our core products against what we've seen as pressure from a lot of small competitors, with less capable products. That's probably the earliest benefit. The secondary maybe the more important benefits over the long run are the TAM expansion and the attachment opportunity with Scout as a standalone product.

[Ryan Macdonald, Senior Analyst at Needham & Company]

Great. It's exciting to hear and can't wait to hear more. Thanks.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Thanks, Ryan.

[Operator]

Next question is from Tom White with D. A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

[Tom white, Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson Companies]

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Two if I could. I was hoping you guys could just give a bit more color on drivers of the revenue outperformance in the first quarter. And I guess specifically, the direct ARR improved sequentially there by a few million bucks, I think.

[Tom white, Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson Companies]

Maybe talk a little bit about the extent to which it was sort of legacy product driven versus some of your newer offerings versus maybe some of the recent M and A like hearsay? And then just secondly, on the buyback, I think that the kind of the pace of buybacks ticked up in the quarter versus kind of the cadence of the past couple. Maybe you might just talk about like your appetite to focus on reducing the share count here potentially just given the strong cash flow, the improved liquidity after this debt deal? Like where is the buyback kind of ranking with your other kind of opportunities or things you're thinking about? Thanks.

[Darryl Bond, Chief Financial Officer at Yext]

Thanks, Tom. It's Daryl. On the revenue and the ARR performance in Q1, it was a couple of things. One, we did see a bit of a tailwind from FX rates. If you recall, for the last few quarters, we've been talking about FX headwinds, particularly as it relates to the pound and that sort of abated and came back.

[Darryl Bond, Chief Financial Officer at Yext]

And I think the rates at the end of Q1 this year are kind of roughly in line with where they were Q1 of last year. So that drove some of the improvement on both the revenue and on the ARR side. And we called it out in the shareholder letter in the back pages after the remarks. But we also continue to see improvements in retention. We disclosed gross retention and net retention on the basis of ARR.

[Darryl Bond, Chief Financial Officer at Yext]

And our customer success motion and our ability to retain customers and drive value to customers continues show improvement and that also helps with obviously the revenue, but also the ARR picture. On the buybacks, I'll make a couple of comments, but obviously, you saw where the stock traded throughout Q1 and even at the levels that we're at today, we continue to believe it's a great investment when you look at it from an EBITDA multiple perspective. So, it becomes a really important tool in our capital allocation belt. And I'm sure Mike will have some additional comments.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Yes. I think we're going to look at the buyback as an opportunity I think we've since over the last three years, I think we've reduced the overall share count. I think we'll continue to look to drive that type of anti dilution through the business as especially with the what we think is the stock price being very attractive. As far as our optionality around buyback versus M and A, it's not necessarily an eitheror situation. So we have a really strong balance sheet.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

We have cash, we have cash flow, and now we have a great partner with BlackRock and a debt facility that would enable us to look at the opportunistic about highly accretive acquisitions. And so it does feel like it's going to we'll continue to be a good time to look at M and A opportunities. But again, I just don't really think that that's necessarily an either or situation. You can see, we did buy a lot of shares in Q1 and we continued to buy shares in May because we gave you the year to date or I guess through the 05/30 number there. So, we feel great about that investment just as we feel great about the M and A transactions we've had with Hearsay and Placescap.

[Tom white, Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson Companies]

Got it. Appreciate that. Thanks, Daryl. Thanks, Mike.

[Operator]

The next question is from Rohit Kulkarni with ROTH Capital Partners. Please go ahead.

[Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC]

Hey, thanks. Nice quarter guys. Just on the organic part of the business, net ARR, net retention rate is up. That's a very healthy sign. Any color as to what is driving that with regards to upsell or any improvements in GTM that you may have implemented?

[Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC]

And then kind of on the odd like I know both companies are now fully integrated, but anything that you can share with regards to the core Yext growth rate excluding Yext and Scout?

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Yes. So I think the first question was it's a little hard to hear you, Rohit, but I think it was net retention and what's driving it. So I think the good news is we're seeing gross retention and net retention both up. To me, what I observe in the business is I observe that and it's no secret that we've been fighting a lot of sort of good enough at half price for a long time in the business on a lot of our core products, certainly on the listings products primarily. I think in this and I mentioned this a few times in this world where it's getting harder and harder to manage brand visibility because you have to go so far beyond just sort of the core GMV page at this point.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

That is having an impact in customer value perception across our product and that's going be an anti churn metric for us, both in terms of logo churn, but also in terms of downgrade churn because it's really not going to be an environment where you can afford where a brand can afford to be missing out on opportunities to generate visibility through proper citation building, through listings, through reputation, social and all those products. So we're really encouraged to see that the market is and our customers are very focused on this. And I think it's helping a lot that we have best in class products here and that the value the perception of value of those best in class products are I think they're getting the attention that they deserve with because of the search the fragmented search environment. I forgot what your second question was. I'm sorry.

[Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC]

Just any other color on the growth in the underlying core Yext business, excluding DRSA and Scout?

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Yes. I mean, I think we're in a similar place in terms of the stability of that ARR. And what's going to help us there are two things that are going help us there, obviously. One is going to be better retention, which we're seeing, and the other is going to be more upsell, and that comes from the opportunity to attach more products. So the way I look at this is we have I just described the whole sort of, I think, value perception of our core.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

That's going to help a lot with gross retention situation, especially as we get into our heavier renewal periods, which are always in the back half of the year. So you can move the needle a little bit in the earlier in the first half of the year, but most of the because most of the book winds up being up for renewal in the second half of the year, it becomes really that's where you have the opportunity to really change that math. And then on the upsell, what you need is you need innovative products that customers value in order to get the upsell and the boomerang customers that drive ultimately the ARR growth. So we're encouraged on both of those fronts. We're really excited about the customer reception for Scout.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

Our customers are watching AI disrupt the landscape in which they try to manage their digital visibility, and they need AI products like Scout that are going to help them to combat the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities of fragmenting digital search landscape.

[Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC]

Okay, great. And I guess just maybe a why or why now around this kind of loan facility that you have from BlackRock, maybe just talk about kind of there obvious conclusions one can draw, but would love to hear kind of why and why now? Are you seeing any specific kind of urgency in pursuing some growth initiatives that led you to doing it now?

[Darryl Bond, Chief Financial Officer at Yext]

Hey, Rohit, it's Daryl. One of the primary reasons was that our facility our credit facility with SVB was expiring at the end of the calendar year. So we needed to do something because we do leverage that for some availability to collateralize letters of credit with leases and things like that. But as we got into the conversations with BlackRock, we realized obviously they're a really great partner. They're well known.

[Darryl Bond, Chief Financial Officer at Yext]

They felt really good about our business. And we looked at the opportunity. And as Mike mentioned with our point of view on the M and A outlook and the opportunities that may arise, it just made sense for us to do something a little bit bigger. The SVB facility was written years ago right around the time we did our IPO. Some of the covenants were meant for a smaller company.

[Darryl Bond, Chief Financial Officer at Yext]

So as we got into the conversations, we felt pretty good about the terms we were getting, about the covenants we were getting and the flexibility it provides us with some of the things we want to do to continue to invest and grow the business.

[Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC]

Yes. Okay. Okay.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

The only thing I would add to that, Rohit, this is Mike is, I think we've done two acquisitions in the last year basically. One of those was what we think is a highly accretive strategic acquisition and here's our and obviously, PlacesScout was a smaller but very strategic, I think, led acquisition. We're really happy with both of those and we think that the opportunity for more of those exists. We're going to be super diligent and I think very disciplined buyers. But this environment is definitely creating opportunities, just as it's creating organic growth opportunities, it's also creating opportunities for us to consider different assets.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

And having a facility in place with a partner like BlackRock is just going to make it easier for us to be really, really smart and agile when it comes to those opportunities.

[Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC]

Okay. Okay. Anything with the word agent taking the PR would definitely help. I'll go back to the queue. Thanks.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

I'm sorry, anything what?

[Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC]

The word having agent take, agent taking your

[Operator]

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mike Walrath for any closing remarks.

[Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board at Yext]

I'd just like to thank everyone for joining and for all of your support and look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.

[Operator]

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Participants

Executives

• Nils Erdmann, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations
• Mike Walrath, CEO and Chair of the Board
• Darryl Bond, Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

• Naved Khan, Managing Director at B. Riley Securities
• Ryan Macdonald, Senior Analyst at Needham & Company
• Tom white, Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson Companies
• Rohit Kulkarni, MD & Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Partners, LLC