How the Location Resolver works

The user passes an address as input and receives the business location at that address as output.

The API requires just one address as input, in free text and at any level of formatting. Optionally, a company name or a Veridion company ID can be passed alongside it.

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What a business location is
In the Veridion universe, a location is one company's operational presence at a physical place. It is not the address on its own, and it is not the full company profile. It is the site level record of what a company operates at that place: its activity, its size, and the building it occupies.
A location can be any place where a company operates, staffed or unstaffed. This includes offices, retail stores, warehouses and distribution centers, factories and plants, gas stations, substations, mines and quarries, onshore solar and wind farms, and construction sites.

Two ways to call the API

The Location Resolver can be used to answer two different questions:

Address only: "What is operating here?" Used when you hold an address and need to discover the business tied to it.
Address and company: "Does this company operate here, and what is the site?" Used when you already hold both and need to confirm the connection, then retrieve the site level detail.

A supplied company name or ID serves two purposes. In a place occupied by several businesses, it identifies which one you mean. In any case, it lets the API confirm whether that specific company operates at the address.

What the API returns

The API returns one of four outcomes, and never picks arbitrarily between them.

1. A single business location was identified

The address resolves to one business, and the API returns its location record: the operating company, its activity and size at the location, and the building it occupies when building data is available.

This happens when:

the address points to a building with a single occupant;
a supplied company name or ID identifies one business at the place;
the location is an addressable site with no building, such as a solar farm, a substation, or a standalone industrial site.

2. The address resolves to a shared building

When the address resolves to a place occupied by several businesses and nothing in the input identifies which one you mean, the API does not return an arbitrary tenant.

Instead it reports that the place is shared, and returns the building reference along with the number of businesses operating there. The full list of occupants can be retrieved separately.

This is the expected result for multi tenant office buildings, retail complexes, malls, industrial parks, and similar shared business locations.

3. The address appears to be a registered company address

If no operating business can be identified at the address, but the address is recognised as a company's registered address, the API reports this explicitly rather than returning it as a location.

This means Veridion found a legal registration signal at the address, but no evidence of business activity there.

4. Nothing was found

The input was specific enough to attempt resolution, but nothing matched. The API does not return a low confidence substitute, a nearby unrelated business, or a broad area guess.

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Operational presence, not legal registration
The Location Resolver reports where a company actually operates. Registered and mailing addresses are not treated as business locations, and are never returned as one.
This is what distinguishes it from registry and firmographic data, which anchor a company to its legal or headquarters address rather than to each site it runs.

Accepted input

The API expects an address that identifies a place of business or its immediate surroundings:

a precise building or unit;
a full street address;
a road level reference, such as a named street or an intersection;
a facility access point, such as a gate or an entrance.

Inputs that point only at a broad area are rejected, because they cannot identify a place of business:

a city or town;
a district or neighborhood;
a very broad postal or ZIP area;
a state, region, or country.

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Addresses, not place names
The API resolves addresses. Place and facility names are not accepted: parks, airports, landmarks, venues, ports, and other named points of interest.
A business inside a large site is reached through its own street address, not through the name of the site it sits in. For example, a warehouse in an industrial park is resolved by the warehouse's address, not by the name of the park.

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Tip
Address precision drives confidence. An input that pins an exact building resolves at high confidence, while an input that resolves only to a street or an access point is matched by proximity and is flagged at lower confidence, so you can tell how the result was reached.

What the API does not do

The Location Resolver is deliberately scoped:

It is not a directory. A single call does not return every business at a shared building. When the address resolves to a shared place, the API returns the building reference and the occupant count, and the full list is retrieved through a separate call.
It is not an area search. It will not return all businesses in a city, postal area, industrial park, port, or campus from one broad input. Each call resolves to a specific place or its immediate surroundings. If you have an area and a set of criteria rather than a place, use the Search API.
It is not a company profile. The response identifies the operating company by Veridion ID and name. The full company record is retrieved from the Match & Enrich API.

These boundaries keep the API fast, predictable, and unambiguous.

Companion endpoints

Three read endpoints support the resolver response, for workflows that need more than a single location:

Retrieve a location by ID: used to fetch a location the resolver referenced but did not return inline.
Retrieve a building by ID: returns building level detail such as geometry, footprint area, height, floors, and structural attributes.
List the locations at a building: returns every business operating in a given building. This is the follow up call for a shared building result, and supports workflows such as post event claims aggregation, catastrophe risk analysis, and shared building exposure assessment.

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Resolution logic
For details on how an address is matched to a place, how a supplied company changes the result, and how the search area is determined, see the How resolution works section.

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Resolving vs. searching
The Location Resolver is not designed for discovery. If your use case involves finding companies that meet a set of criteria rather than resolving a known address, please check the Search API section.