Get Full Name Match Similarity Key API

API Overview

The same person often appears in your data many different ways: "William Johnston", "Bill Johnson", "MR WILL JOHNNSON III". To a database, those are three different people.

That inconsistency quietly erodes the value of your data. It creates duplicate customer, contact, and member records, splits a person's history across multiple entries, triggers duplicate mailings and outreach, and undermines reporting, analytics, and AI initiatives. It is also hard to fix. Exact-match joins miss these records entirely, and simple fuzzy matching struggles with nicknames, misspellings, titles and suffixes, reversed name order, and international name variations.

The Full Name Match API solves this by generating a similarity key for each name, so inconsistent individual names can be matched, deduplicated, and linked within or across your data sources and datasets.

How It Works

Names that look different to a computer generate the identical similarity key, so finding a match becomes a simple exact comparison.

Full/individual names generating the same similarity key are considered "similar" and possibly the same. Once generated, these similarity keys can be used in many ways. This includes sorting by similarity key in one dataset to find duplicates, using them as a basis for matching across datasets to significantly increase match rates, or as an index as part of a fuzzy search mechanism for better, more comprehensive search results.

API Details

Algorithm & AI Model Information

Additional Resources

Sample Matches Found Using Similarity Keys

Combination Matching: Match on Multiple Fields

Need to match on more than just an individual's name? Our combination matching APIs generate a single composite similarity key from a full name paired with an additional field, enabling higher-precision matching when you have more data available.