Duplicates

Manage duplicates finds contacts and companies that look like the same one, so you can merge them. Open it from the ⋯ menu on the Contacts page or the button on the Companies page.

How duplicates are found

Choose Scan for duplicates. The scan runs in the background, and once you've scanned, it runs again every day. Two records are suggested when they have:

• Contacts: the same email or the same phone number.
• Companies: the same domain (from the domain or the website), or the same name. Free mail like gmail.com and sites like linkedin.com never count.
• Your own rules: under Duplicate rules, pick up to 9 properties (any of yours, custom ones too). Records whose properties all have the same value, none empty, are suggested. Text ignores case and extra spaces. Owners and admins manage rules.

A big workspace's scan stops at 50,000 records or 10,000 pairs; the page then says the results are partial.

Reviewing a pair

Review shows both records side by side. Pick the record to keep, then the value it keeps for each property: by default its own, or the other's where it has none. Only properties that differ hides the rest. Merge saves it; Not a duplicate moves the pair to Rejected, where Restore brings it back.

To merge records the scan didn't suggest, choose Merge with… on a contact or company page and pick the other one.

What a merge does

The other record is deleted and everything linked to it moves to the one you keep:

• Contacts: lists, tags, email topics, campaign emails and history move. The strictest status wins, so a contact who unsubscribed, bounced or complained is never emailed again because of a merge. A topic either one unsubscribed from stays unsubscribed. An opted-in contact's consent record is kept.
• Companies: every contact moves to the company you keep, and segments and saved views that pick the other company use the kept one.

In a business group, the record you keep stays shared, or takes the other's place when only the other was shared. Only a workspace that can edit shared records merges shared ones.

Merging many at once

Select pairs in To review and choose Merge selected, then which record each pair keeps: the oldest, the newest, the most recently updated, or the one with the most recent activity. Each pair keeps its record's values and fills the empty ones from the other. Pairs that share a record have to be reviewed one at a time.

Undoing a merge

History lists every merge, rejection and restore. Unmerge brings back the merged record and puts everything that moved back where it was. If something the merge changed was changed again since (the kept contact's email, say), the unmerge is refused and tells you what changed.

In the API

list_duplicates, scan_duplicates and reject_duplicate work with suggestions; merge_contacts and merge_accounts merge two records (take names the properties to take from the duplicate), and unmerge_duplicates undoes a merge. See the API reference.