Concepts

Entities and candidates

An entity is a confirmed record, anchored to a government registration. A candidate is our best hypothesis when we could not confirm one, either because confidence was too low to separate two matches or because the entity type is not fully supported yet. Today confirmed records are incorporated businesses. Sole proprietors, partnerships, governments and funds come back as candidates. A response populates entity or candidate, never both. type and subtype tell you what was found either way.

Identifiers

Three ID levels, one system.

Prefix	Level	Use
siq_	Global entity	Your primary key, and the only ID /v3/entities/{id} accepts
op_	Operational presence	How the entity operates in one country
le_	Legal entity	One specific registration in one jurisdiction

A global entity can have many registrations: a Delaware corporation, a UK subsidiary, and so on. primary_legal_entity is the anchoring one. le_ and op_ IDs appear inside records but are not lookup keys.

siq_ IDs are stable. If two records are consolidated, the response returns status: "merged" with merged_into set, and serves the canonical record. Store the new ID.

Entities also carry external identifiers in identifiers[]: registry registration IDs, LEI, CIK and others where known. See Codes & enums.

Registry-first data

Every confirmed entity is anchored to an official government registration. That anchor is what keeps IDs stable and what separates two companies that share a name. On top of it, research agents search registries, directories, news and the company's own site, then attach what they find to the registration.

Confidence and provenance

match_confidence (0-100) says how certain we are that the result is the entity you asked for. factors[] lists the strengths and limitations behind that score, and actions[] suggests what to add when a query is ambiguous. Both use stable codes. See Codes & enums.

Pass include=basis for per-field provenance: for each field, the confidence, the reasoning, and citations back to the sources, each tagged with an authority tier.

Freshness

Registry data updates on each registrar's cadence. Web-sourced enrichment refreshes periodically. /v3/entities/{id} never blocks: it serves what exists now and reports the build state in enrichment.status. When a record has never been enriched, the first read starts the build in the background. Poll until enrichment.status is complete.