Confidence model
Every field returns as {value, source, confidence}. What verified, extracted, heuristic, and inferred mean — and how to speak to each level.
No field comes back as a bare value. Every company and contact field returns as a small envelope:
{
"value": "procurement@example.com",
"source": "provider",
"confidence": "verified"
}
The confidence tier tells you how far you are allowed to go when you repeat
the claim to someone else.
The four tiers
| Tier | What it means | How to speak about it |
|---|---|---|
verified | Provider-confirmed | Treat as fact |
extracted | Pulled from a website crawl | Candidate data, not a fact |
heuristic | Derived from secondary signals | A suggestion |
inferred | A model's best guess from context | A hypothesis |
Why this matters more than it looks
The tiers exist because the alternative is a list that looks uniformly
authoritative while being built from four different kinds of evidence. An
inferred job title presented as a fact is how outreach ends up addressed to
someone who does not hold that role.
Reviewing before sending
Contact data is the place where the tiers bind hardest. The CLI is deliberately weak at producing send-ready contacts without review — that is a design position, not a gap. Before an outreach run, filter the list down to the tiers you are willing to stand behind, and treat the rest as leads to confirm elsewhere.
Related
- Coverage and data sources — the parallel envelope on shipment queries
- Enrich companies and contacts — where the tiers show up in practice