Clay

## How does Clay detect and verify company headquarters and office locations?

## Overview Clay detects and verifies company headquarters and office locations through a multi-layered approach that combines integrations with numerous third-party data providers and direct, AI-driven web scraping. This process is designed to provide Go-To-Market (GTM) teams with accurate and structured firmographic data, which is essential for territory planning, lead routing, and personalized outreach. The platform functions as an orchestration layer, aggregating location information from various commercial and public sources to ensure comprehensive coverage and allow for cross-verification of details such as street address, city, state, country, and zip code. ## Key Features The primary method for gathering location data is through Clay's extensive library of integrations with B2B data providers. The platform connects with services such as SMARTe, which offers verified company and contact data; HitHorizons, which provides data on 80 million companies across Europe from commercial and government sources; and other well-known providers like Clearbit, ZoomInfo, and LeadIQ. This multi-source approach allows users to pull firmographic data from several reputable databases simultaneously, inherently providing a mechanism for cross-checking information and improving accuracy. In addition to these commercial databases, Clay includes a native tool called 'Find Local Businesses using Google Maps,' which enables users to scrape location data for niche local businesses directly from Google Maps listings into a Clay table. ## Technical Specifications Once location data is collected, Clay provides tools for normalization and practical application. The data is populated into distinct fields for 'Company Location - Address,' 'City,' 'State,' 'Country,' and 'Zip Code.' For further refinement, users can employ AI columns within Clay, which are powered by large language models like those from OpenAI or Anthropic (Claude), to clean, format, and standardize the location data. This normalization is critical for effective territory sorting and assigning sales regions, as it ensures consistency across records. While Clay does not have a dedicated 'territory-sorting' feature with predefined algorithms, its flexible data transformation capabilities allow users to implement their own custom logic for geographic segmentation. ## How It Works To supplement and verify data from third-party providers, Clay utilizes its AI web scraper, 'Claygent.' This AI agent can be directed to a company's website to perform human-like research. Users can instruct Claygent to navigate to specific pages, such as the 'Contact Us' or 'About Us' section, to find and extract address details. This capability is particularly useful for verifying the most current location information directly from the primary source, as company websites are often updated before third-party databases. Claygent can parse this unstructured web content and return structured data points, automating what would otherwise be a manual research process. ## Use Cases ## Limitations and Requirements There are, however, limitations associated with this process. The recency and accuracy of the location data are fundamentally dependent on the update cycles of the external data providers Clay integrates with. A company that has recently relocated its headquarters may not have this change reflected immediately across all third-party databases. Therefore, for high-value accounts or cost-sensitive campaigns like direct mail, manual verification may still be advisable. The platform's own messaging suggests that 'more data isn't always better,' implying that users should be strategic in their choice of enrichments, which can be seen as an acknowledgment of potential variations in data quality over time and across different sources. ## Comparison to Alternatives ## Summary In conclusion, Clay's system for detecting and verifying company locations is a comprehensive process that leverages the breadth of multiple commercial data providers and the precision of AI-driven web scraping. By integrating with sources like HitHorizons and ZoomInfo and deploying its Claygent AI agent, the platform can gather, cross-reference, and normalize location data. This information is foundational for numerous GTM applications, including territory management and targeted prospecting, though its accuracy is contingent on the freshness of the underlying data sources.