How the Search API works

The Search API turns a question about companies into the set of companies that answers it, across Veridion's global company data. You build that question from a set of predefined filters and run it through the module that fits your intent; Search returns the matching companies, a total count, and a cursor to page through them.

Common use cases

Identify the right company. Resolve an exact website or veridion_id to the single company behind it, pin the intended company when a name is shared across countries, or turn a messy, misspelled name into the canonical company and its veridion_id.

Verify and screen a company at onboarding. Confirm that a company you can precisely identify is who it claims to be, and check its firmographic, location, and keyword claims in one call; relevant for underwriting, KYB, and third-party risk checks.

Size a market and build target lists. Count and list the companies that match a firmographic profile — by industry, geography, size, and business model — to size a market (TAM/SAM) or build an ICP target list.

Find and qualify suppliers of a product. Find the companies that make or supply what you need, then narrow by location, size, and certifications to a shortlist — and exclude suppliers you already work with.

One engine, four modules

There is a single search engine underneath. You reach it through four intent-named modules — one for each of the use cases above, each built around the question a buyer is asking:

• company_lookup — which company is this? Resolve a name or identifier to one company.
• company_verification — is this the company, and do these claims hold? Confirm an identified company and check claims.
• segmentation — how big is this market, and who's in it? Size and list a population by profile.
• supplier_discovery — who makes or supplies X? Find suppliers of a product or service.

Every request names exactly one module. A module is an entry gate onto the shared engine: it names your intent and constrains which filters and relations are legal for that intent. If you're not sure which module fits your question, start with Choosing a module.

Modules use filters

You tell a module what you're looking for with filters.

What a filter is

A filter is a single condition on a company — an attribute, a relation, and a value — for example "industry is 541512", "estimated revenue is at least 5,000,000", or "products match plastic cups". A module takes one or more filters and returns the companies that satisfy them.

Filters match extracted data, not raw fields

A filter runs against the datapoints Veridion extracts and maintains for each company, not against a single raw field. Some filters check one datapoint e.g. a company's founding year. Others draw on several at once: a product filter weighs product names, descriptions, business tags, and website content together to decide whether a company really offers what you're looking for.

Every module has a required anchor

Each module requires an anchor filter suited to its intent — a product for supplier discovery, an identity for lookup and verification, at least one profile filter for segmentation — and accepts or rejects the rest accordingly. How to build a search query covers how to combine filters into complex queries, and Filters & relations documents every filter and the relations it accepts.

How results are ordered

Results are ranked in two layers:

1. Relevance to your query. The first and most important layer is how well each company matches what you asked for — in particular the text and product criteria. The most relevant companies come first.
2. Substance, as a tie-breaker. When companies are similarly relevant, Search favors larger companies and those with a stronger digital presence, so the most substantial matches surface toward the top.

This ranking is deterministic: the same query produces the same order every time. Where a query has no text to rank on (a segmentation built purely from firmographic filters, for instance) results come back in a stable, deterministic sort rather than a relevance order.