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Understanding match confidence

When you run landbase-cli match person or landbase-cli match company, the response includes a tier field that describes how confident Landbase is in the match. Understanding what each tier means helps you decide when to act on a result and when to treat it as uncertain.

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The four tiers

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strong

Landbase has found a unique, high-confidence match. Multiple independent signals align: name, company, domain, LinkedIn URL, title, or location all point to the same record. You can treat a strong match as reliable for CRM updates, enrichment, and automated workflows.

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likely

The match is probable but relies on fewer signals. For example, a name + company domain match where the name is not globally unique. A likely match is good enough for most practical purposes, but worth a spot-check if the downstream use is high-stakes (like sending email to the matched address).

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plausible

Landbase found a candidate that fits the input but could not fully disambiguate. For example, “John Smith at Acme Corp” where there are multiple John Smiths at similar companies. Use plausible matches with caution — treat them as leads to verify rather than confirmed records.

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unlikely

The candidate Landbase found is a weak match. The name or company partially aligns but multiple signals point in different directions. unlikely matches should generally not be used directly; they are included so you can see what the closest match was and decide whether to discard or manually review.

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How tiers are determined

Landbase evaluates a combination of signals when matching:
  • Name similarity — exact match vs. partial match vs. common-name ambiguity
  • Company alignment — does the domain, legal name, or LinkedIn match the supplied input?
  • Geographic consistency — does the person’s known location match what was supplied?
  • LinkedIn URL — when present, this is a strong disambiguating signal
  • Title/department — secondary signal, used to break ties between similar candidates
More signals → higher confidence tier. The tier reflects the quality of evidence, not a probability score.

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What to do at each tier

TierTypical action
strongUse directly. Safe for CRM writes, enrichment, automated outreach.
likelyUse for most tasks. Spot-check high-stakes cases.
plausibleReview before using. Good for generating a candidate list for manual verification.
unlikelyDiscard or manually review. Do not use in automated pipelines.

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Tier in the response

The tier appears in the result object: 
{
  "result": {
    "tier": "strong",
    "match_reason": "Matched on LinkedIn URL and company domain",
    "candidate": {
      "member_name_first": "Daniel",
      "member_name_last": "Saks",
      "member_websites_linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielsaks"
    }
  }
}
The match_reason field gives a plain-English explanation of which signals drove the match — useful for debugging unexpected tiers.