People Data Labs API
Enriches person and company records with professional data including employment history, education, skills, emails, and firmographics by matching against a database of 1.5 billion+ person profiles and 100 million+ company records.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
API key via header (good practice). Contains PII-adjacent professional data — GDPR and CCPA compliance documentation available. No granular scopes for limiting data access per key.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You need comprehensive B2B professional enrichment with high match rates across a broad input signal set (name, email, LinkedIn URL, phone, etc.).
Avoid When
Your use case involves consumer data enrichment in regulated contexts (FCRA/CCPA compliance requirements), or you need real-time data freshness guarantees.
Use Cases
- • Enrich a lead record with current employer, job title, and work email by matching on name and personal email for CRM automation agents
- • Look up a company's headcount, industry, funding stage, and tech stack by domain name for sales intelligence workflows
- • Build a prospect list by querying for people matching specific job titles, industries, and locations using the Search API
- • Verify and augment a contact database with standardized employment history to improve segmentation for marketing automation
- • Identify decision-makers at target accounts by searching for C-suite and VP-level profiles at specific companies by domain
Not For
- • Consumer identity verification or KYC compliance — PDL data is B2B professional data, not regulated identity data
- • Real-time social media monitoring or content analysis
- • Highly accurate personal phone number lookups — mobile numbers are sparse and lower confidence
Interface
Authentication
API key passed via the `X-Api-Key` HTTP header. Single key grants access to all endpoints the account is provisioned for.
Pricing
Credits are consumed only on successful matches with data returned. Failed matches (no data found) typically do not consume credits.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ A 404 response means no matching profile was found — this is a business logic outcome, not an error; agents must handle this as a valid non-match case
- ⚠ Match confidence varies widely; the `likelihood` score should be used to filter low-confidence matches before using the data
- ⚠ The Search API requires careful field selection — requesting all fields on large result sets can be expensive in credits and slow
- ⚠ Employment data may be out of date by 6-18 months for job changes; do not treat current employer as real-time fact
- ⚠ Bulk enrichment via the Bulk endpoint has different rate limits and response timing than single-record lookups
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for People Data Labs API.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.